Fire: Good and Evil

When I was a kid, I was really fascinated with fire and the pow er that came with it. I would find insects in my yard and experiment in lighting them on fire but I also used fire for lighting the wood in the fireplace and keeping my family warm . In Fahrenheit 451, fire has multiple meanings and can stand for destruction, cleansing, and change. Fire can be used to symbolize these things for both good and evil and so it plays a very important and complicated role in the book. Ray Bradbury uses fire to represent warmth and kindness. In the first sentence of the novel introduces the role of fire saying, "It was a pleasure to burn. It was a pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed" (3). Obviously fire is a symbol of destruction, but in this quote fire has multiple functions. It destroys the book in one sense, but in another it changes the book and even creates something new. Montag himself discovers an alternative use for fire at the end of Fahrenheit 451, when he realizes that it can warm instead of destroy. It is compared to the cycle of life and the reason why fire has a constructive and destructive side. The books that are burned, each character in the book is forced to understand themselves and confront different perspectives.

That gets me to my point were fire represents good when Montag burns Beatty. When Montag sets Captain Beatty on fire he also wants to clear society of something he thinks is evil. Montag thinks that burning books is evil and Captain Beatty symbolizes the society of burning books. Montag also burns Captain Beatty to clear himself because he knows he has been doing something wrong all along by being a fireman and burning books. Montag has to kill Captain Beatty because the Beatty is going to kill him. He also wants to do it to try to make up for all of he has done by burning Captain Beatty so that the Captain cannot hurt any more people and burn anymore books. Before Montag kills Beatty, Captain Beatty tells Montag that fire's "real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later" (115). Captain Beatty thinks that you if you burn something, you could make problems go away without having to face them because he believes that fire can only destroy. After Montag kills him, he turns to Captain Beatty's body and says "you always said, don't face a problem, burn it. Well, now I've done both" (116). He says this because he knows that fire can destroy a problem but to decide to burn something you have to face the problem first. Montag's problem is that he wants society to change or if he cannot do that, he wants to live a different life. He burns Captain Beatty because that is the only way he sees he can free himself and change his life by not being a fireman.

Knowledge is power. We need to feed our brains with as much knowledge as possible, so when Beatty and the Firemen go around burning the books into ashes, it is an evil task to not let the people have their learning tools. Taking them away is a crime and a force of evil. The citizens of Fahrenheit 451