The plot takes place in an unspecified future time, in a country whose society’s goal in life is hedonistic pleasure and abandonment of self-control. By this point, books have been made obsolete due to the increasingly frenetic pace of life and the ever-shortening attention span of the common man - nobody has “time” to read anymore, and the ideas in these books are considered heresy to the point that they are burned whenever discovered.The protagonist, Guy Montag, works with grim pleasure as a fireman, seemingly committed to the concept that books have nothing to say.
The stench of kerosene in his nostrils and the spark in his eyes do little, though, to mask the loneliness he feels coming home to his wife, Mildred, a woman who is at all times seeking self-stimulation (whether it be the miniature radio jammed in her ear at night, or the three tv-screens in the parlor). But having met Clarisse McClellan, a girl living in Guy’s neighbourhood who is considered abnormal because of her compassion and her simple interest in the world around her, his way of thinking is changed. He no longer wants to burn books - he wants to know if they have something worth listening to. He looks up Faber, a chance contact who was once an English professor before his class was eliminated, and attempts to convince his wife and her friends that books are worth reading, with disasterous results. Things come to a head when he is called to a final house - his own.
There, confronted by his fire chief, Beatty, he scourges the house with flame, destroying his former life before finishing the job with Beatty, killing him and knocking out his fellow firemen. He then flees for his life, pursued by the relentless Mechanical Hound. After convincing his now friend Faber to escape as well, and a harrowing chase from the city, he reaches the river and floats downstream, before coming across an outcast group of men who are “walking libraries”, those who have committed entire books to memory to share with those who would listen. The city, and others as well, are soon afterwards struck with the atomic bomb, destroying them - and hopefully the lifestyle that they contained, so that people might once again learn from the books, and learn from the past.
Ray Bradbury
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)
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