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In the book, Guy Montag, the main character, begins to question the things around him when he meets a local girl. He quickly feels comfortable with her and they begin to have discussions about mundane things that seem to open up Montag's eyes. Then one day, the girl is gone. In a short few weeks, he had become dependant on the girl's company. Once she is gone, he finds himself changed by having known her. When he goes to work on one of the following days, there is a fire alarm. He and the other fireman rush to answer the call, and discover an old woman in a house with books and magazines in her attic. They quickly gather the illegal materials together, and douse them in kerosene. They are trying to coax the "crazy" woman out of the house, when she brings out a match. Guy stays and tried to talk her out of it, but is unsuccessful. This experience haunts him all night and into the next day. He doesn't go to work the next day, and his boss, Beatty, knows why. I think that this "crazy" woman is a representation of the beliefs of the Salem witch trials. People all around them were calling them devil worshipers and telling them that they were going to hell. Even though they knew it would be certain death, as did the "crazy" lady, they s
tood fast with their beliefs and died for them. She represents a courage that most common people don't have. She knew that she had to be true to herself. Beatty comes to Guys' house and tells him the "truth" about the origin of firemen. He tells him that people before the civil war were very simple. They had books, but it didn't really matter because there was no mass to it. Once the technological revolution came about, people stopped wanting all the excess that was included in the book. People became more interested in the snap ending, the quick pay-off. Because of this, people began to neglect teaching things like philosophy and sociology in school. No one needed it; they were all learning to be professional athletes or mechanics, or some other simple job where no book learning was required. The simple fact that the bigger the population that you have, the more minorities you get took affect. People were afraid to write because they didn't want to offend anyone. Books became nothing, not important, meaningless. There was no official ordinance, no censorship to start the firemen's job of burning books, people had brought it upon themselves, and now all that was left for them to read were the comic books and "three dimensional sex magazines." But that was what they wanted. This is the point in the story where Montag realizes that he and Captain Beatty are becoming enemies, and also that he needs to find someone else to listen to and learn from. Every assignment he takes
Some common words found in the essay are:
Guy Montag, Montag Faber, Writers Guild, Captain Beatty, Senator McCarthy, Ray Bradbury, crazy woman, , today's society, woman house, faber tells, salem witch, american history, people passed,
Approximate Word count = 996
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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