CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Guy Montag is the novel’s protagonist and its main point of view character

Guy Montag is the novel’s protagonist and its main point of view character. He is the only character whose thoughts and emotions are described for the reader (other than a couple of short sections that report the Mechanical Hound’s point of view). Since the major focus of the book is Montag’s transformation from a dedicated fireman to a participant in an underground library movement, the use of the third-person perspective allows the reader to follow Montag’s development, witnessing how he responds to the events and characters around him.

The opening section is a scene from Montag’s point of view. This section does not use Montag’s name and is primarily composed in the passive voice, a sentence structure that denies that any subject has agency, or the power to act. The first line of the novel is “It was a pleasure to burn” (3). The lack of a name and the passive voice constructs Montag as representative of all firemen, anonymous, focused on the pleasure inherent in the process of destroying books, houses, and people.

Montag begins to question his life and society and comes to the realization that neither he nor his wife Mildred are happy. His unhappiness is shown by his hiding of forbidden books, and her unhappiness surfaces in regular attempts to commit suicide. Montag begins to wonder why he is unhappy. By the end of the novel, Montag has become an active participant who has claimed his own agency; leading a group of men through the wilderness, he recites part of what he has memorized from the Bible. Planning to share his “book” with his fellow “librarians,” Montag begins to take on the status of a leader, someone who is planning a better future.

The other characters in the novel serve as either catalysts or supporters for Montag or as antagonists who work against him, and are described in terms of the effect they have on him. The characters Clarisse and Faber contribute most to his change and support him, while Mildred and Captain Beatty oppose his attempts to change and become his antagonists.

The same characters interact with Montag throughout the novel. He is influenced by Clarisse’s disappearance, Mildred’s addiction to the “TV parlor,” or televisor, and Faber’s own attempts to resist the socially driven destruction of all books, as well as people who try to save books. Pressure from the Fire Chief and Captain Beatty and the ongoing announcements of war that punctuate the novel also contribute to Montag’s change.

Montag’s prominence as the protagonist results in a greater narrative focus on his development as a character than is the case for the other characters. What he thinks about his marriage and wife Mildred, his sense that they have both lost something (which Mildred denies when he tries to talk to her about it), his fear of the Mechanical Hound, his attraction to Clarisse, as well as his childhood memories and perceptions of the men he works with all create a characterization with emotional depth. Other characters’ actions and speech are described, but no information on their thoughts or feelings is given.

The reasons why other characters do what they do are not as clear, but their effect on Montag is described. Clarisse and Faber have important conversations with Montag that cause him to doubt his social function and way of life. Clarisse, a young woman who lives with her family near Montag, likes to do things most people consider crazy: walk at night; talk about happiness, love, and nature; and question what is presented as normal or socially appropriate. The other character who supports Montag in his changing ideas is Faber, a retired English professor, who has been trying to work out a solution to the book burnings on his own. He has not moved to active resistance because, as he tells Montag, he’s a coward. One of the main functions Faber serves in the novel is to answer some of Montag’s questions and to give him ideas for how to change what he is doing. Faber shelters Montag from the Mechanical Hound and helps him escape to the countryside, where he meets an underground resistance movement, consisting of mostly philosophy and literature professors who are remembering books that they hope to write down after the war.

Two characters in the novel serve as antagonists and represent the larger antagonist in the novel, American society: Mildred and Captain Beatty. Mildred, Montag’s wife, is addicted to the televised mass culture provided nonstop; she sees the characters in her programs as more real than her husband. However, her unacknowledged unhappiness with her life is shown by regular suicide attempts. After Clarisse’s disappearance, Montag challenges Mildred. After one conversation, Montag brings out books he’s been hiding for a year, since his first conversation with Faber. Mildred’s first response is to try to cover up for him in some way, then to withdraw even further into her TV parlor; eventually, she turns him in. Mildred does not want to question society’s reliance on technology and its choice to burn books. She does not remember her suicide attempts and denies that she is unhappy in any way.

Captain Beatty is a more active antagonist. Beatty represents the institutional or government voice, while Mildred is constructed as a consumer of the TV parlor’s representation of the world. Beatty presents the official history of the firemen to Montag, but Beatty is also able to quote a great number of books and to recognize the source of something Montag had read. Beatty can quote Philip Sidney, Alexander Pope, Dr. Johnson, and a plethora of other authors not identified in the text (105–6) as he argues against Montag’s desire to save and read books. The Fire Chief quotes books to prove that the texts contradict each other. His knowledge of books along with his position show that the government allows some people in power access to books as long as they remain dedicated to burning books owned by individuals. Chief Beatty finally pushes Montag to his limit, and Montag kills him.

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