Fahrenheit 451 Exploratory Draft

Cale Houghton

Exploratory Draft

My proposal: I am interested in writing about Beatty and all the contradictions he has, because I want to understand why he is always quoting books, and why he wanted to die. One reason he might have wanted to destroy books, despite his knowledge of them is that he read them, and they reflected reality on him. And because reality is so depressing, he wanted to die.

Looking over my proposal, I realize that my claim does not really go very deep. It is more of an observation about the text that I made, because:

• It’s pretty obvious Beatty read books.
• Yeah, books don’t solve any problems for you, that doesn’t need to be said.
• Well he didn’t want to die because the world was so wonderful. The people in this world are obviously are not happy. Suicides happen regularly. So that is kind of just a observation.

So I was thinking of ways that I could explore this more fully.

For the second bullet: Did Beatty expect books to solve any problems for him? If you take the risk in that society to read books, you probably thought they would do something for you. So Beatty expected books to do something for him: To figure that out, I looked at Montag’s pull towards books, because his story seems very similar to Beatty’s. So, what brought Montag into books? Well, he started collecting books before the book began, but in the span of the book, he always mentions books in association with birds.

So now, I’m onto birds. What they usually represent in literature? Freedom of course. They fly around and do anything they want. For example, the Bald Eagle, which symbolizes the freedom found in America. I was actually pretty excited when I found this, because it fits perfectly into the story. The thing that people don’t have in this world is freedom. They do the same thing every day of their lives, because the mysterious government tells them that it’s normal. So people that work with books, the firemen, are the only ones who really get to see the freedom of books, the things that the government has kept away from everyone else. It seems like the one way that they can escape.

Another thing I didn’t include in my proposal is the firemen’s relationship to fire. Thinking about it now, fire does its job every time, just like they are supposed to. And when it does that, it gives them a basic happiness like their walls do. It represents their confinement. Also, it burns books, which shows how it clashes with freedom.

So Beatty (like all firemen, according to him) saw this parallel between books and freedom / fire and confinement, so he expects books to save him from the sad reality that everybody in the book denies. And, as I said before, books may be enlightening to some people, they are just pieces of paper. They have no magic. If someone (like Beatty) were to realize this, after expecting their life to be saved, they would turn bitter against books, and resort to the simple, empty pleasure of destroying with fire.

Sorry if this didn’t make too much sense. It made sense to me at the time.