Fahrenheit 451

The plot takes place in an unspecified future time, in a country whose societys goal in life is
hedonistic pleasure and abandonment of self-control. By this point, books have been made
obsolete due to the increasingly frenetic pace of life and the ever-shortening attention span of the
common man - nobody has time to read anymore, and the ideas in these books are considered
heresy to the point that they are burned whenever discovered.The protagonist, Guy Montag,
works with grim pleasure as a fireman, seemingly committed to the concept that books have
nothing to say. The stench of kerosene in his nostrils and the spark in his eyes do little, though, to
mask the loneliness he feels coming home to his wife, Mildred, a woman who is at all times
seeking self-stimulation (whether it be the miniature radio jammed in her ear at night, or the three
tv-screens in the parlor). But having met Clarisse McClellan, a girl living in Guys neighbourhood
who is considered abnormal because of her compassion and her simple interest in the world
around her, his way of thinking is changed. He no longer wants to burn books - he wants to know
if they have something worth listening to. He looks up Faber, a chance contact who was once an
English professor before his class was eliminated, and attempts to convince his wife and her
friends that books are worth reading, with disasterous results. Things come to a head when he is
called to a final house - his own.
There, confronted by his fire chief, Beatty, he scourges the house with flame, destroying his
former life before finishing the job with Beatty, killing him and knocking out his fellow firemen. He
then flees for his life, pursued by the relentless Mechanical Hound. After convincing his now
friend Faber to escape as well, and a harrowing chase from the city, he reaches the river and
floats downstream, before coming across an outcast group of men who are walking libraries,
those who have committed entire books to memory to share with those who would listen. The city,
and others as well, are soon afterwards struck with the atomic bomb, destroying them - and
hopefully the lifestyle that they contained, so that people might once again learn from the books,
and learn from the past.
Ray Bradbury