Fire In Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451: In Search of a Controlled Burn
Ray Bradbury’s protagonist in Fahrenheit 451 revels in seeing things eaten and things blackened by fire. His name is Montag and his world is immersed in flames from the outset, with a blaze so bright before his kerosene spitting python that it blinds. He breathes in fire beneath a flameproof jacket, his burnt-corked countenance expresses fire with a permanent grin “driven back by flame,” while his perfume is the overwhelming stench of kerosene. His existence hinges upon fire so thoroughly that his experiences are defined in its terms. Clarisse, on the other hand, lives under moonlight, atop the grass, and in clothes of white as she radiates fragrances of apricots and strawberries while the wind
Montag baulks at Clarisse’s insights and accuses her of thinking too much. He shoots her accusatory glances as they walk in silence, him clenching and uncomfortable while she continues to think. Montag feels the way he does because Clarisse shows him the things he’s missed, the beauty he’s overlooked, and he receives her illumination as condescending. While Montag is entranced by Clarisse upon entering his home his disposition towards her seems ambivalent. The hook is set when he enters the darkness of his own home and realizes that his own candle has burned out, and that only through the illuminating light of Clarisse’s slowly burning candle could he see its lifeless wick. Clarisse had run off with Montag’s mask of happiness, leaving his raw emotions to plague his mind. She had destroyed his façade of blazing splendor just as the jets destroy the city, and she leaves him with no other option but to rise out of his own spiritual ashes and start
Clarisse is the agent for causing Montag’s world to melt down and spring up “in a new and colorless form,” and it is her who provides him with the pallet to add the color. Montag adds color to his world very slowly at first, letting only the light of the moon through his drapes. While before Montag “did not want the moon to come into the room,” he now chooses to let the light through. Montag nevertheless goes to sleep with a frown on his brow, indicating his inability to wholly embrace the light. The cataract formed in his eye by the moonlight’s reflection, however, suggest that he may still blind to its beauty, to its truth. While Montag’s meeting with Clarisse earlier in the evening surely influenced his decision to open his mind, his skepticism continues and recedes slowly over the course of his interactions with her. The next time Montag encounters Clarisse she is letting the rain fall into her mouth. Montag finds this an odd thing to do. By the time she parts from him; however, we see Montag tilting his head back in the rain in order catch a few droplets in his mouth. The momentum of his embrace of the natural world thus progresses through these small yet powerful experiences influenced by Clarisse until his laugh “sounds much nicer than it did,” indicating his embrace of his own natural self and the world around him