Ensayo De Eli

Summary of Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag is a fireman in charge of burning books in a grim, futuristic United States. The book opens with a brief description of the pleasure he experiences while on the job one evening. He wears a helmet emblazoned with the numeral 451 (the temperature at which paper burns), a black uniform with a salamander on the arm, and a “phoenix disc” on his chest. On his wayhome from the fire station, he feels a sense of nervous anticipation. After suspecting a lingering nearby presence, he meets his new neighbor, an inquisitive and unusual seventeen-year-old named Clarisse McClellan. She immediately recognizes him as a fireman and seems fascinated by him and his uniform. She explains that she is “crazy” and proceeds to suggest that the original duty of firemen wasto extinguish fires rather than to light them. She asks him about his job and tells him that she comes from a strange family that does such peculiar things as talk to each other and walk places (being a pedestrian, like reading, is against the law). Clarisse’s strangeness makes Guy nervous, and he laughs repeatedly and involuntarily. She reminds him in different ways of candlelight, a clock, and amirror. He cannot help feeling somehow attracted to her: she fascinates him with her outrageous questions, unorthodox lifestyle, perceptive observations, and “incredible power of identification.” She asks him if he is happy and then disappears into her house. Pondering the absurd question, he enters his house and muses about this enigmatic stranger and her comprehension of his “innermosttrembling thought.”
Montage is disturbed by his meeting with Clarisse because he is not used to talking with people about personal subjects. Upon returning home, he realizes that he is not happy after all, and that his appearance of happiness up to this point has been a pretense. He continues to experience feelings of foreboding. He finds his wife, Mildred, in bed listening to earplug radios called“Seashells,” just as he has found her every night for the past two years. By her bed, he accidentally kicks an empty bottle of sleeping pills and calls the hospital just as a sonic boom from a squadron of jet bombers shakes the house. Two cynical hospital workers arrive with a machine that pumps Mildred’s stomach (Montag later refers to the device as the “Snake”) and another that replaces all herpoisoned blood with fresh blood. Montag goes outside and listens to the laughter and the voices coming from the brightly lit McClellan house. Montag goes inside again and considers all that has happened to him that night. He feels terribly disoriented as he takes a sleep lozenge and dozes off.

The next day, Mildred remembers nothing about her attempted suicide and denies it when Montag tries to tellher about it. She insists on explaining the plot of the television parlor “family” programs that she watches endlessly on three full-wall screens. Uninterested in her shallow entertainments, Montag leaves for work and finds Clarisse outside walking in the rain, catching raindrops in her mouth—she compares the taste to wine. She rubs a dandelion under her chin and claims that if the pollen rubs offon her, it means she is in love. She rubs it under Montag’s chin, but no pollen rubs off, to his embarrassment. She asks him why he chose to be a fireman and says he is unlike the others she has met, who will not talk to her or listen to what she says to them. He tells her to go along to her appointment with her psychiatrist, whom the authorities force her to see due to her supposed lack of“sociability” and her dangerous inclination toward independent thought. After she is gone, he tilts his head back and catches the rain in his mouth for a few moments.
Montag reaches down to touch the Mechanical Hound in the fire station, and it growls at him and threatens him. Montag tells Captain Beatty what happened and suggests that someone may have set the Hound to react to him like that, since...