F51 AP Book Report

Jeffrey Chang
Moskovitz
English 2 Honors
14 September 2014
AP Book Report
1. Title of Work: Fahrenheit 451
2. Author and historical time period: The author of this novel is Ray Bradbury. As he was growing up around the early 1930s, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazis burning books and Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. During the Great Purge, many writers and poets were incarcerated and often executed. These two events indicate political repression and destruction of intelligence.
3. Country of author: He was born in Waukegan, Illinois. Bradbury eventually moved to Los Angeles, California in which he spent the rest of his life until his death.
4. Characters (label as major or minor) with brief descriptions of each; include at least two adjectives for each and brief commentary. Attach a separate sheet.
Guy Montag (major) - The protagonist in the story whose occupation is a fireman. Throughout the story, Montag feels emptiness in his life and questions his way of life.
a) Impulsive- In the story, there are many instances where Montag is impulsive and this often lead him to danger with the dystopian society. One example is when Montag kills Captain Beatty with a flamethrower. Another good example is when he takes a book from the woman’s house. Every time Montag does things brashly, he would accuse his hands for causing him to perform risky actions.
b) Manipulated- Throughout the novel, Montag is easily influenced by the people around him including Clarisse, Faber, Granger, and Beatty. He allows himself to be charmed by Clarisse through her unorthodox conversations. As for Faber, Montag thoughtlessly follows Faber’s instructions through a Seashell earpiece from Faber. Beatty, on the other hand, has several chances to persuade Montag that burning books is a just act and uses his book-learning to manipulate Montag even more. Toward the end of the story, Montag blindly follows Granger and his group to rebuild society. In conclusion, Montag believes nearly everything he hears.
Mildred Montag (major) - She is the protagonist’s wife. Mildred represents every ordinary citizen in the futuristic society and eventually betrays Guy.
a) Concealing- In the story, Mildred seems to act like a bland character watching parlor walls like everybody else. As the story progresses, she seems more disturbed and conceals her emotions. However, her true emotions are bottled up inside because she is disappointed of her insufficient role in society. A good example is her several suicide attempts.
b) Small-minded- Mildred, in this case, is small-minded because she only accepts what society thinks as right. She is extremely uncomfortable with change and unorthodox values, like when Montag showed her his stash of books.
Captain Beatty (major) - He is the captain of Montag’s fire department. Once an avid reader, he soon learned to despise books and their unpleasant values.
a) Contradictory- Beatty is a man packed with paradoxes. He is the head of the firemen, but knows more books than anybody else. Beatty detests books because the meaning of them forces him to ask questions he never wanted to ask and books are confusing to many. But Beatty uses his stored knowledge to be the higher than the rest of society. Despite his knowledge for books, he agrees with society with the censorship and destruction of literature and supports the rise of pleasure and ephemeral happiness.
b) Cunning- Unlike the rest in society, Beatty is remarkably intelligent. He gains this through many eclectic sources. There were many times when Beatty uses his cleverness to deliver quotes to Montag to either distract him or manipulate him to believe false ideas such as houses are fireproof.
Professor Faber (major) - He is a former English professor. He spends most of his time regretting that he doesn’t defend books when he saw the move to do so.
a) Regretful- Faber feels mentally remorseful because he knew that he could have stopped the books from being banned. He always blabbers about his cowardice and must have lived long enough to see the decline of intellectual life.
b) Wise- Faber has seen it all, thanks to his longevity. His experiences contribute to his judiciousness. He longs for free-thought and intellectual life. Faber mentors and arranges a plan with Montag to reprint copies of books again. They also discuss about bringing down the inquisition of firemen to educating the masses.
Clarisse McClellan (minor) - An angelic seventeen-year-old girl who introduces Montag to the world’s potential of beauty and opens his eyes to the world around him.
a) Affable- Clarisse’s magnetic personality allows her to easily talk to Guy unlike the antisocial citizens in Guy’s society. Even her looks release powerful memories onto Montag. She enjoys talking to people and observing the natural world around her.
b) Inquisitive- Clarisse is very curious about other peoples’ affairs and asks numerous questions. Because she is a curious girl, Clarisse tends to be honest and speaks her mind. Although he found her irritating at first, Guy eventually misses her personality and is inspired by her. Clarisse is a minor character, yet she is still one of the most important in the story.
Granger (minor) – He is the leader of the “Book People,” a group of intellectuals Guy finds in the country.
a) Scholarly- Granger and his group of intellectuals use their photographic memories of literature to bring back the meaning of books back into the world.
b) Optimistic- Granger believes strongly in his goal to recreate society and that mankind will soon learn from their mistakes.
Leonard Mead (minor) – He is the unnamed uncle of Clarisse and is indirectly stated in the story. He is the protagonist in Bradbury’s short story, “The Pedestrian.”
a) Solitary- Instead of watching television in the evening like everybody else, Mead enjoys walking by himself and looking at nature. According to the government’s eye, he is considered a peculiar and an antisocial character.
b) Warm- In the short story, “The Pedestrian,” Mr. Mead is associated with warm, bright light, symbolic for the human soul. He has a passion for writing which the robotic police cruiser doesn’t understand and classifies him with no occupation. Because Mr. Mead is Clarisse’s uncle, he reflects her warm and gentle nature.
Mrs. Phillips (minor) – She is one of Mildred’s vapid friends.
a) Sensible- Besides her mundane appearance, she is revealed to be emotional when Montag reads Dover Beach. Secretly, she finds poetry to be beautiful works of art but doesn’t know the meaning to any of it. Mrs. Phillips represents the citizens who suppress their emotions well and are good by heart.
b) Unconcerned- She seems to show no concerns for her third husband going to war and is emotionally disconnected from her life.
Mrs. Bowles (minor) – She is one of Mildred’s friends.
a) Cruel- She seems to regret the birth of her own children and abuses her kids. She is unemotional and berates Guy for reading poetry even though he was told to.
b) Nonchalant- She seems not to care deeply about her miserable life, which includes one divorce, one husband killed in an accident, and one who commits suicide. Despite all this, she easily resumes with her life. Mrs. Bowles represents the citizens who are very wicked and repelled by anything intellectual. 5. Major settings, with a description of each and its effect on the reader:
The Montags’ Bedroom
“They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down into your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the old water and the old time gathered there. It drank up the green matter that flowed to the top in a slow boil. Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years? It fed in silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching. It had an Eye. The impersonal operator of the machine could, by wearing a special optical helmet, gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out. What did the Eye see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one’s yard. The woman on the bed has no more that a hard stratum of marble they had reached” (14).
This scene is about Mildred attempting to use sleeping pills to escape her role in society. With the handymen and their machines, escape is impossible for her and everybody else in society. Although the Electric Eyed Snake can replace her poisoned blood with new, fresh blood, the Snake could never fully heal her emotional pain. After the operation, Mildred’s exterior would be like a mask, happy and normal like everyone else in society. Eventually, her happiness would be ephemeral and Mildred will continue using sleeping pills endlessly. When the reader reads this passage, it sets a gloomy, dark tone describing the citizens’ lives in this dystopian society.

The Old Woman’s House on Elm Street
“You can stop counting,” she said. She opened the fingers of one hand slightly and in the palm of the hand was a single slender object. An ordinary kitchen match. The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements. God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show? The pink face of Beatty now showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman’s hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up around her. Montag felt the hidden book pound like a heart against his chest. “Go on,” said the woman, and Montag felt himself back away out the door, after Beatty, down the steps, across the lawn, where the path of kerosene lay like the track of some evil snail. On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, his quietness and a condemnation, the woman stood motionless. Beatty flicked his fingers to spark the kerosene. He was too late. Montag gasped. The woman on the porch reached out with contempt to them all and struck the kitchen mask against the railing” (39).
This scenario is what makes Guy Montag questions the society he lives in even more. In this passage, the reader learns that the concept of book burning is ghoulish entertainment. The reader sees the firemen in a new light. It makes the readers sympathizes with the scholar woman and sees her as a martyr against an immoral government.
6. Plot Outline, brief:
“And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling gibbering manikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him. There was a hiss like a great mouthful of spittle banging a red-hot stove, a bubbling a frothing as if salt had been poured over a monstrous black snail to cause a terrible liquefaction and a boiling over yellow foam. Montag shut his eyes, shouted, shouted, and fought to get his hands at his ears to clamp and to cut away the sound. Beatty flopped over and over and over and at last twisted in on himself like a charred wax doll and lay silent” (119).
The climax of the story is when the firemen are called to burn Montag’s house and when Montag murders Beatty because the readers now figured out that Mildred’s betrayal against Montag is complete, causing Montag to become a criminal in the eyes of the government. Montag confronts Beatty and decides he must be killed to save himself and humanity. In this part of the story, Montag is subconsciously fighting against the government to receive free thought and to bring down the censorship. With this climax, Montag is getting much closer to his goal of recreating a better society.
7. Major themes of the work (single words and phrases), with some elaboration of each:
Censorship
“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book” (59). Beatty states that books and free thought are censored because they don’t satisfy everybody. In dystopian society, censorship is used to ensure uniformity and happiness. Also, everybody lives hedonistic lifestyles. The government also uses distractions such as loud advertisements and long billboards to prevent people from thinking critically.

Loss of Freedom
“He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house” (3).
This passage compares the pages of a book to the flapping wings of a pigeon. Birds, in general, represent freedom. The passage implies that nobody is able to think question freely. The government has taken away the citizens’ ability to disagree and veiled all dissatisfaction with the superficial version of happiness. Questioning authority is especially dangerous in dystopian society because it allows people to find flaws in the system and overthrow the government.
Rise of Technology
“It’s as good as I remember. Lord, how they’ve changed it in our ‘parlors’ these days. Christ is one of the ‘family’ now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs” (81).
This passage indicates that society turned God into a character in a T.V show rather than actually worshipping Him. T.V is the opposing force in this story and it is responsible for replacing intellect, curiosity, and literature. It became a substitute for friends, families, and actual conversations. Also, law enforcement is replaced with the Mechanical Hound, a robotic predator that is the watchdog of society. To conclude, technology is the government’s mean of oppression. 8. Symbols in the book, with at least 2 instances where each symbol appears and commentary on significance of each:
Mirrors
“[…] Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look at them” (164).
At the end of the novel, Granger told his group they must build a mirror factory to take a long, good look at themselves. This remark relates to Montag’s description of Clarisse as a mirror back at the “Hearth and the Salamander.” In this passage, mirrors represent self-understanding and clarity.
Sieve and the Sand
“Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel cousin had said, “fill this sieve and you’ll get a dime!” And the faster he poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering. His hands were tired, the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. Seated there in the midst of July, without a sound, he felt tears move down his cheeks” (78).
This symbol refers to a childhood memory Montag once remembered trying to fill a sieve with sand. He was reminded of this episode when a loud advertisement about toothpaste distracted Montag from memorizing the Bible. To Montag, the sand symbolizes the knowledge that he seeks and the sieve symbolizes his mind trying to grasp the knowledge and retain it.
9. Other significant imagery? Attach a separate sheet.
“The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light flickering in its suddenly activated eye-bulbs. It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electrical sizzle, a frying sound a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.”
The passage describes the robotic enforcer of the dystopian society. It shares little resemblances with its animal counterpart and can inject enough morphine to vanquish its victims. The Mechanical Hound represents government control and manipulation.
“Montag looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and ten thousand imaginary fires, whose work flushed their cheeks and fevered their eyes. These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and soot-colored brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed. Montag started up, his mouth opened. Had he ever seen a fireman that didn’t have black hair, black brows, a fiery face, and a blue-steel shaved but unshaved look? These men were all mirror images of himself! Were all fireman picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities” (33)?
This passage shows how Guy Montag realizes the homogenous nature of his society. Other than looks, Montag differs from the firemen in his department because of inquisitive nature. Montag seems to be more observant of details after Clarisse dies from an alleged car accident.
“The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting” (5).
The passage describes Clarisse’s angelic appearance as she walks toward Guy Montag. It seems Guy is inspired by her pure appearance as she is the light to his darkness. The reader could already tell by this passage that Clarisse is an innocent girl who goes against the beliefs in a dystopian society.

10. Significance of title of work: The title of Fahrenheit 451 is significant because 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature paper catches on fire. The title alone foreshadows the horrors of book burning.
11. Author 's techniques that are important to this work:
Foreshadowing
“He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but-what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle” (7).
Besides of Clarisse’s eye reminding Montag of a comforting memory with his mother, the passage holds much more than this. Montag compare her eyes to a soft, gentle light of a candle. This foreshadows that Clarisse, the helpful light in the dark, will be easily extinguished.
Third Person P.O.V
“Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time” (12).
The author uses third person point of view to make the story more suspenseful. It is more interesting compared to if the story is narrated in first person. This point of view revolves around certain characters. The reader can understand the situation and anticipate what is going to happen.

Allusions
“[…] where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now” (38)!
This is one of the many passages in this story that contain allusions. This passage is about Beatty telling the woman to flee her house and also alludes to the biblical Tower of Babel. Allusions use references from other stories or famous works to make the story familiar and more interesting.
Work Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1996.

Cited: Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1996.