“What is there about fire that’s so lovely?… It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did… What is fire?… Lets real beauty is that is destroys responsibility and consequences… Clean quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical” (Bradbury 1 15). This section of reading is without argument dominated by fire and its effects. For the society in F 451, fire is the magic elixir for cleansing life of its hardships and enigmas. Montage uses fire to cleanse his life of the restraints that are holding him back from freedom. Before Chief Beauty sends Montage to burn his own house, he informs
Montage that fire is the solution to everything. Beauty sends Montage into his home with a powerful weapon. This powerful weapon is simply an explanation. To the readers dismay, the explanation is later used against its dragomen. As Montage begins to enjoy burning his own house down, he begins to concur with Beauty that fire is the solution to anything and everything. Bradbury makes it evident that Montage enjoys burning his house by using descriptive accounts like “it was good to burn” (116) and “Fire was best for everything” (1 16). As he fires each shot of liquid fire, Montage is incinerating is past into ash.
Fire plays a contradictory role in this reading. Montage uses fire as his liberator against his past, while at the same time violates its vast power. Since Montages past has held him down for so long, he is feeling pleasure getting rid of it. To do so, he uses fire’s sheer dynamism to justify his problems, a lesson he derives from Chief Beauty. Montages cowering back to his old way of thinking shows the reader that he may not have changed as much as he believes he did. This is the case until he gets rid of the seconds thing that is holding him back from total edification.
The barrage of quotes and explanations that Beauty radiates help prevent Montage from becoming completely contumacious and incorrigible against power. To eliminate the force that prevents him from being liberated, Montage uses fire to kill a pundit of fire. Ray Bradbury has filled F 451 with instances of irony, so unsurprisingly he uses a major one in the climax of the novel. Beauty uses fire to defend his mentality and the mentality of society, but ironically the Bulgarian of fire leads to Beauty’s demise. In tonight’s reading, Montage successfully exterminates two of the three wings that hold him back from outright emancipation.
To eliminate Chief Beauty and his past, Montage uses fire. LCP to this point, Montage uses fire as a tool for dissipation. In this section, however, Montage uses fire as a tool to free himself from the restraints of a vacant life. Bradbury depicts to the reader that Montage craves change by writing “burned the bedroom walls and cosmetics chest because he wanted to change everything’ (116). The third and final obstacle that is holding Montage back from utter freedom is his own conscience. If he can learn to control his feelings and reasoning, Montage will be free once and for all.
