Fahrenheit 451: Part 1 — “The Hearth and the Salamander”
Episode 44
Professor Pipes is coming in hot this week with Ray Bradbury's burning satire of censorship that set the literary world ablaze, Fahrenheit 451. Part 1 is here: “The Hearth and the Salamander” (two things you should never be without, obviously).
TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide
Transcript
Introduction:
Hello and welcome to Piper’s Paraphrases! I’m Professor Pipes and today we’re talking about FIRE!! Well, burning books. But before you start thinking I’ve given up my love of literature, let me clarify: I’m talking about Part I of Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopia, Fahrenheit 451. So light the bonfire and let’s get started
Characters:
Before we get to plot, I’ll go over some of our main characters, and just for funsies, I’m gonna give each one a book genre that fits their personality!
Guy Montag is our protagonist, a fireman. Nope, not the kind that puts out fires, Cooper. In this futuristic society, firemen start fires. Every pyromaniac’s dream. Specifically, they burn books and homes with books in them. Surprisingly, Guy is strangely drawn to books despite his career, leaving him dissatisfied with his job, his life, and his society. Let’s put him in the self-help section.
Speaking of dissatisfaction, Mildred is Guy’s wife. She’s a product of their dystopian environment, obsessed with television and unable or unwilling to fully engage with reality or her husband. Even though she’s portrayed as frustratingly immature and uninvolved, she’s also a tragic figure, as we will soon see. Hmm… Tragedy or picture book? Why not both!
Clarisse McClellan is the teenaged neighbor of the Montags. She’s curious and loves to ask questions and learn, qualities rare in this society. She both intrigues and confuses Guy as they become friends and he learns more about her - and himself. Until they fridge her. She’s definitely in the YA section.
Captain Beatty is the fire captain, but he’s not exactly easy to… read! He’s a bit of a paradox, since he is staunchly in favor of destroying books, but it’s also clear that he is very well read, often quoting or referencing the books he so clearly hates. He’s straight up nonfiction. Tells it like it is. And then burns it.
Later on in the story we’ll meet some rebel book lovers, like Faber and Granger, but I’ll leave them in the mystery section for now.
Plot Summary:
“It was a pleasure to burn.” So begins our novel, as our protagonist is in the midst of burning a house full of books with his trusty flamethrower. On his way home, he meets the teenager who almost seems to have been waiting for him and whose family recently moved in next door, Clarisse McClellan. She immediately starts asking him questions, like why he’s a fireman and if it’s true that firemen used to put out fires. Apparently her parents never warned her not to talk to strangers. She also tells him all about herself, telling him that she and her family are super crazy - called it! - and they do strange things like talk to each other! Crazy! Before she skips off like your favorite manic pixie dream girl, she asks Montag if he’s happy, and he’s struck and confused by the question.
Montag soon realizes that he’s not happy. And apparently neither is his wife, because when he enters the bedroom, even though at first he thinks she’s just listening to airpods - I mean “seashell” earbuds - he soon finds an empty bottle of sleeping pills and calls the hospital just as jet bombers soar overhead. Oh yeah, because there’s also some sort of imminent war looming. This is a dystopia, after all. Mildred’s stomach is pumped and her blood is replaced by a couple of hospital workers who reveal that this kind of thing happens all the time. What lovely bedside manner. Montag goes outside and observes actual happiness at the McClellan house, hearing chatter and laughter as his home and life feel like they’re falling apart. Ironically, Montag takes a sleeping pill to fall asleep that night and wakes up to discover that nothing happened last night - at least according to Mildred who won’t talk about any of it. Instead, she talks about her television family, with whom she spends her whole day every day as she watches them on, sadly, only three of their four parlor room walls. As he leaves for work, Montag finds Clarisse catching raindrops in her mouth like the life-loving girl she says she is! She continues to chat with and question Montag and rubs a dandelion on her chin - as one does - saying that if it leaves color behind, that means she’s in love. When she rubs it on Montag, no color. Obviously it’s because she already rubbed off all the color - not because he’s in an unhappy, loveless marriage. When Clarisse asks why he became a fireman, he takes a page from his wife’s book - Ba dum bum ch - and refuses to talk to her about it. Luckily for him, she leaves to go see her court-ordered psychiatrist. Montag takes a moment to catch raindrops in his mouth before he continues on to work.
At work we’re introduced to the mechanical hound. I know what you’re thinking - Yay!! Doggie!! But nope - it’s more like nightmare fuel, a killer robot with eight mechanical spider-like legs who growls at Montag, and apparently not for the first time. Montag tells his boss and asks if maybe it had been reprogrammed to react to him like that and Captain Beatty tells him he’ll have it checked out. For the next week, Montag and Clarisse talk every day on his way to work, but on the eighth day — POOF! — she’s nowhere to be found. At work Montag asks Captain Beatty what happened to the man whose house they burned at the start of our story, and is told he went to the insane asylum, which ALMOST makes Montag reveal his own collection of books - Uh oh! He then asks the same thing that Clarisse had asked him - whether firemen used to PREVENT fires. His fellow firemen regurgitate what their rule books say - oh yeah, apparently rule books are ok - which is that Ben Franklin established firemen to burn English books. Yep. Sounds about right. Then the alarm sounds and they head off to burn a little old lady’s book collection, where Montag “accidentally” takes a book. After they douse all the books in kerosene, the lady refuses to leave and in one of the most horrifying scenes of the book and of Montag’s life, she strikes a match, choosing to burn along with her books.
Back at home, Montag hides the book under his pillow. As his wife chatters about her television family, Montag asks her how they met ten years ago, but neither can remember. Mildred then goes to take sleeping pills, and Montag wonders how many she has taken already and if she’ll forget and take more. He asks if she knows anything about Clarisse McClellan, whom he hasn’t seen in a couple of days, and Mildred nonchalantly says that she thinks Clarisse was hit by a car and killed, and then the family moved. The next morning, horrified by the events of the day before and the news of Clarisse’s death, Montag stays home sick from work. He tries to talk to Mildred about everything - his job, the woman who burned, Clarisse, books, emotions - but, as usual, she won’t engage. Then Captain Beatty arrives - dun dun DUN!
Surprisingly, he’s there for story time! Well, story within a story time! Beatty explains the true history of firemen, admitting that they used to put out fires. He explains that as visual media - like tv and movies - became more popular, people’s attention spans and desire to actually think about their media decreased. In addition, with more options available, unique stories became less common, since there was a push to make everything popular to the masses. Meanwhile “minorities” and special interest groups got offended by, you know, probably offensive stuff in books, but since by then no one wanted to actually think and engage in difficult conversations, the government decided it would be easier to just burn all the books except for things like comics, and apparently the fireman manual. Since by then all houses were fireproof, firemen got their new job of burning books. It’s clearly a very noble profession, since it prevents people from having to feel inferior to more successful people or feel bad about the world or… feel. Like at all. Montag brings up Clarisse, and Beatty mentions they’d been keeping an eye on her and her family for a while, and she’s better off dead. Just didn’t fit in, you know. Meanwhile, Mildred has started tidying up the room and stumbles upon the hidden book. Beatty pretends not to notice and tells Montag that every fireman becomes interested in books eventually, and they’re allowed to keep one for a day or two, and then need to burn it. He says that he’s read enough books to know that they’re all complicated and contradictory and better off burned, so he encourages Montag to return to work before he himself leaves. However, Montag has decided never to return. He then tells Mildred about his secret stash of books and is determined to find something of value in them before he has to burn them, so he picks up a book and begins to read.
Analysis:
Now that we’ve gone through the plot - man, that took a while - it’s time to talk themes and motifs.
First up, this is a book about burning books, so obviously we have to talk about Censorship and its connection to Knowledge. According to Captain Beatty, who embodies the belief system of this dystopia, “A book is a loaded gun.” Dangerous. After all, you never know “who might be the target of the well-read man?” It’s you! Just kidding. It’s true that books sometimes make people feel uncomfortable, and I’m not just talking about paper cuts. They make you think. They force you to face problems in society or even within yourself. And that doesn’t feel good. In a society that values pleasure and peace of mind over truth, that means that “the word ‘intellectual’ became [a] swear word.” But of course intelligence doesn’t just disappear automatically, as is shown with people like the McClellans, so you have to… nip them in the bud. And that’s where censorship comes in. If “white people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book about tobacco and… The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.” If a family is a ticking time bomb because they laugh and talk and think? Burn them. Or make them… disappear... Then cram the rest of the world full of memorization, random facts, “noncumbustible data” so “they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy.” Happy and docile.
Similarly “dangerous” in this society is Individuality. Much like books, this dystopian society doesn’t like differences in people, since that just breeds jealousy and hostility. According to Captain Beatty, “You always dread the unfamiliar” and this is precisely why, as Beatty says, Clarisse McClellan is “better off dead.” In a society that so desperately wants to censor information, knowledge, progress, and thought, people like Clarisse, who “didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why” just don’t fit in because they don’t fall in line. After all, if you keep on questioning the world around you, “you wind up very unhappy indeed,” and this is a society so concerned with “peace” that they’d rather dumb everyone down and make everyone the same so no one has anything to complain about, since if everyone is made the same as everyone else, each person “...the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.” And this process of “equalizing” everyone has been working. Apparently “they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.” Robotic utopia… So basically Ray Bradbury is pointing out that censorship is a means to destroy both knowledge and individuality. What a useful tool.
In this book, Technology is very much the enemy and is responsible both for the extreme censorship and the dumbing down of society. In fact, “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure did the trick.” And Bradbury ain’t just talking about the newest iPhone. Which barely even existed in his lifetime. He takes it alllllllll the way back to the advent of photography, since basically it was a slippery slope from that to film and television. Pretty soon “Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift.” Everything gets shortened and condensed until you “Whirl man’s mind around about so fast… that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary time-wasting thought.” The more technology advances, the more they can consume, and the more they consume, the less they actually think. Mildred, who epitomizes the “perfect citizen” in this society is unwilling or unable to carry on conversations about anything “real” - her emotions, Montag’s fears, or books - but she is perfectly happy babbling on and on and on about her real “family” in the walls. Technology has not only replaced knowledge, but it has replaced relationships and families. Apparently, according to this story, technology just might be the root of all evil… eyes! But don’t turn the computer off just yet, folks!
We still have to talk about Fire. Fire is a consistent motif in this story and seemingly represents opposing ideas: both destroying and cleansing. I mean, even the first lines draw attention to this; “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.” And change is exactly what is going on with our fireman protagonist, Montag. The embers of fire are all over the place, even in this section’s title “The Hearth and the Salamander,” both words that are associated with fire, but not necessarily destruction. The hearth traditionally symbolizes the home, so where there is fire, there is home, and Montag does feel very at home amidst the flames at the start of the story. The salamander’s connection to fire is… well, weird. In the book, the salamander is the image for the firemen and they even call their firetrucks “salamanders.” Historically, salamanders have been associated with fire, for various frankly fascinating reasons, but most of the time they’re associated with the extinguishing of fires or being immune to fire. An ironic choice for these firemen’s job, reflecting more of what firemen “used” to do long ago, before book burning and fireproof houses. In a way Montag is both the hearth, at home with fire at first, but ready to extinguish the literal and metaphorical flames by the end of the section. But still standing in his way is Captain Beatty. Captain Beatty calling the shots. Captain Beatty explaining the noble history of firemen as he absent-mindedly lights and extinguishes a match. “Strike, blow out, strike.”
Food for Thought:
Before I put my seashells in and zone the world out, let me leave you with some food for thought.
First, is Clarisse McClellan a complete character? In other words, does she seem more like a real person with complexities or more like a literary tool who just exists to get Montag thinking and changing?
Second, what evidence is there to suggest that Mildred is actually unhappy, suffering mentally from her situation, and what evidence is there to suggest that her troubles stem from her ignorance and unintelligence?
Third, this story is a dystopia, but Captain Beatty describes how their society was originally a “normal” one. What parts of his history lesson have actually come true in our world?
Fourth, there is a war looming in the background of this part of the story, but it isn’t referenced very often so far. Why not? And why do you think Bradbury decided to include a war at all?
Finally, Bradbury laments about the “Classics cut to fifteen-minute radio shows,” but here you are watching a classic being shortened, summarized, and paraphrased. So is he right? Is the existence of a video like this evidence of the breakdown of our society’s intellect or is there a benefit to making literature more accessible to the masses?
Thanks for watching this episode of Piper’s Paraphrases. Now go forth, burn a bunch - I mean read a bunch, and be good people.
