Individuality In Fahrenheit 451

As the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury explores the theme of conformity vs. individuality, characters demonstrate both the dangers and rewards of each. First, the characters demonstrate the pros and cons that come with conformity. Guy Montag’s originally simple and organized life lets him find great pleasure in simple things: ‘It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blachened and changed.” Also, Montag’s and his wife’s biggest worry is “how long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wasll torn out and a fourth wall-T.V. put in?” This is all Montag has to worry about because all he knows are his simple pleasures and ways of making them better. Moreover, Montag feels almost no negative emotions and is able to easily with the loss of his closest
companion; had he have really lost her “he was certain he wouldn’t cry.” But this choice to conform to the standards of society brings with it negative results.
Montag’s life is incomplete as he begins to change when he says to Clairesse, “You think too many things.” He says this uneasily at the slowly revealing fact that this 16, almost 17, year old girl thinks, knows, and understands things that “made him quite irratable.” Along with these two problems, Montag also becomes very confident in his ignorance of the truth and he shows this when he says, “Houses have always been fireproof, take my
word for it.” Because Montag never takes the time to think about things and he believes everything he is told he stays this way for some time after he says this. Second and last, through Montag’s and others characters, the novel is able to show how both enriching and frightening individuality can be. Montag’s choice later in the book to become an individualist allows him to be able to have time to think about everything in his life in detail: “The sun burnt everyday. It burnt time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt time, that meant that everything burnt. One of them had to stop burning.” This was only one example of his new ability to live life not moment to moment but to see it in greater detail than he had ever thought he would. These thoughts began when he ran from the police and the hound trying to catch him then suddenly “He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.” All of these new revelations may seem great but there is a downside to individuality. In Montag’s society, individuality is looked down on and in some extreme cases such as his own, it is illegal to be an individualist. While running from the police, he heard on a portable television an announcement for all the people of the city to look out their windows and when he heard this “He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray colored eyes, gray tongues, and gray thoughts looking out though the numb flesh on the face.” He knows that he must avoid the cops at all costs because “twenty million Montags running, soon, if the cameras caught him.”