Plot Summary
The time is the near future, and the place is an unnamed typical American
city. Guy Montag, a thirty-year-old
"fireman," is a model citizen of his community: he takes pleasure in
his work, he earns a good salary, and he lives with Mildred -- his wife of ten
years -- in a suburban house, with all the latest appliances and wall-sized TVs.
But in this world, "firemen" don't fight fires -- they start
them. Books and reading are banned,
and the firemen's job is to burn down houses containing books... sometimes
burning down the person inside, too.
Montag has always thought he was happy in his work, in love with his
wife, and generally satisfied with life. But
things start to happen which force him to question his perception of his world
and himself. He meets a neighbor,
seventeen-year-old Clarisse McClellan, who asks Montag profound questions about
history, nature, and his own feelings. He
discovers his wife, Mildred, attempting to kill herself -- but after he calls
the paramedics to pump out her stomach, she refuses to acknowledge or talk about
her overdose, instead returning to a life spent
watching her full-wall TVs. And
he starts to see the anomalies in his society which no one talks about: the way
everyone watches TV instead of talking, the way the world moves so fast that
people have no time to think and are always dying in car crashes, and the way
his country is silently inching closer to war.
Montag finds that he is no longer happy.
His boss at work, Fire Captain Beatty, teases Montag about his new
squeamishness. Meanwhile, the Mechanical Hound -- a horrible hunting robot
in the shape of a dog which helps the firemen hunt down book owners -- seems to
become strangely hostile toward Montag. When
the firemen respond to a fire alarm, and end up burning down a houseful of books
with the woman who owns them still inside, Montag finds himself sickened and
shaken. This sensation is
heightened when he learns that Clarisse is dead, killed by a car.
Montag, half unconsciously, stole a book from the house just before
burning it-- and we learn that he's been stealing books from burning houses for
the past year. At home, he reveals his hidden pile of books to the horrified
Mildred, and insists that she help him try to make sense of them.
Montag also remembers meeting an old man named Faber in a park the year
before: Faber, a former English professor, quoted poetry to Montag, and Montag
decides to make contact with him. After
much trouble, he convinces the passionate but frightened old man to join him in
a scheme to destroy the firemen's network from inside, by planting forbidden
books in their own firehouses and then calling in reports.
He also gives Faber a rare Bible he's stolen, to be saved and reprinted
in the underground printing network, and promises to give him money to help.
Faber, in turn, gives Montag an electronic invention of his own: a tiny
earplug that fits in Montag's ear like a "green bullet," through which
Montag can hear Faber's voice and Faber can hear everything said to Montag.
Faber, who is now "with" Montag all the time, begins to tutor
him in literature, history and philosophy.
But when Mildred has invites two of her superficial friends over to
watch television, Montag -- enraged by their smug attitude -- recklessly pulls
out a book and reads them an ancient poem.
The women leave angrily, and Mildred flees in tears.
When Montag goes off to work, Fire Captain Beatty, apparently amused by
Montag's recent self-doubts -- which he says are perfectly normal for many
firemen -- gives Montag a lecture on why books are useless.
Then an alarm sounds, and the firemen respond to it -- only for Montag to
discover that they have arrived to burn down his own house.
As Mildred flees the house with a packed suitcase, jumping into a taxi
for the city, the amazed Montag learns that Mildred herself phoned in the report
of Montag's hidden books. Beatty
orders Montag to burn his own house and books, and Montag numbly obeys.
As the house burns in the darkness, Beatty mocks Montag and finally
strikes him across the face. Montag's
"earphone" falls out, and Beatty recognizes what it is.
When he laughingly tells Montag that he will track down and arrest Faber
too, Montag snaps and attacks Beatty with his kerosene-filled fire house,
burning him to death. Then he burns the Mechanical Hound, which leaps out of the
darkness to attack him. Montag
knocks the other two firemen unconscious, grabs the few books which have not
been destroyed, and -- hardly able to take in what's happening to him -- flees
to the back alleys.
Montag heads to Faber's house. He
gives him his books and the last of his money, and together they make plans:
Montag will flee to the river and follow it to the wilderness, where it is said
that hobo camps live outside of the urban societies.
Faber will catch a bus to St. Louis first thing in the morning to see a
printer he knows there. As he
leaves Faber's house, Montag hears on his earplug radios, and sees on the
televisions in the house windows, that there's a manhunt on: another Mechanical
Hound is after him.
Montag reaches the river just before the manhunt find shim.
He is washed downriver in the darkness, until he comes to a wide, dark
land: the wilderness. Crawling
ashore, he finds the railroad track Faber told him about, and follows it into
the darkness. Suddenly, he stumbles
across a campfire surrounded by old men. Montag
joins them at their fire, and finds they already know who he is -- they have
seen the news on their battery-powered television.
The old men introduce themselves: They are a group of former professors,
writers and humanists, part of a nationwide network of people who have fled
modern society to live freely between the cities. And each of them carries, in his head, a book which he has
memorized, and which they hope will someday be written down again when
civilization has changed. Montag
offers to add the little he knows: passages he's memorized from the Book of
Ecclesiastes in the Bible he gave to Faber.
On their television, Montag and the others watch the end of his manhunt.
After Montag escapes, the authorities framed someone else, and the
Mechanical Hound kills an innocent person to make the TV audience happy.
Montag is now free from their persecution. He decides to join the old
men, who, right now, are keeping a strange vigil: War has been declared, and
they are waiting to see if the city will be bombed -- which would indicate an
end, and new start, to civilization.
At sunrise the next morning -- before their very eyes -- a trio of jet
bombers appear over the city, bomb it to smithereens, and as rapidly disappear.
Civilization is clearly coming to a close, and -- the men hope -- to a
new start. Montag stays with them
as they begin the journey toward the city, to see what remains and what will
happen now.
