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Part One: The Hearth and the Salamander. (-68)
1. The first sentence of the novel states, "It was a pleasure to burn.... His hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of ... burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history." Whose attitude is expressed in this statement, what is his occupation, and what is he burning? [Guy Montag, a "Fireman," is burning books and the houses where they were found. (3)]

2. What does the Salamander in the title of this section signify?

3. Who meets the protagonist on his way home? What is the topic of their conversation? [Clarisse McClellan asks Guy Montag if he ever reads any of the books he burns, and she comments that people in their society are moving too rapidly to notice the grass or the moon, then asks Guy if he is happy. (4, 8-10)]

4. Describe Mildred's lifestyle. What does Guy discover when he arrives home? What does she want for her home? [Mildred is caught up in a radio world of musical entertainment, and she takes sleeping pills, at least thirty sleeping pills the first day of the story. Mildred wants an entertainment screen for the fourth wall of her room. (12-13, 18, 20-21)]

5. Describe the Mechanical Hound, and explain its function. [The Firemen keep an eight-legged, hound-like, insect-like robot that can be programmed to detect particular combinations of amino acids, etc., and to anesthetize a victim with its proboscis. (24-26)]

6. Who was the first Fireman? What happened to change the role of firemen? [Benjamin Franklin was allegedly the first "fireman." When houses became fireproofed, firemen acquired a social control function. (34)]

7. Who was Nicholas Ridley, and what is the significance of this allusion? [Nicholas Ridley was burnt alive at Oxford on October 16, 1555, for heresy. The woman who committed suicide rather than leave as the firemen were buning her books is like a heretic in this society. (36-40)]

8. What does Mildred find under her husband's pillow, and where did he get it? [Mildred found a book that Guy salvaged from the collection of the old woman who committed suicide. (41, 50, 53, 56, 65-66, 68)]

9. Where did the McClellan family live? [Chicago (60)]

Lawson, Benjamin S. "Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion (Review)." Utopian Studies 12 (Wintr 2001): 133. Expanded Academic
"'Symbol and Metophor' offers readers the templates of fire, mirrors, metamorphosis, the wilderness, and censorship with which to interpret Bradbury's novel. Pauline Kael's piece on the book and the film provides a negative slant, as it finds that the 'book people' at novel's end are static and passive, far from representative of a living tradition of intellectuals who create and use words rather than merely become words. These memorizers in effect make books fetish and totem. Rafeeq O. McGiveron, however, links books with nature by pointing out the many bird and other nature metaphors used in describing books. To postmodern readers, however, McGiveron's emphasis on books being nature makes Bradbury almost self-consciously old-fashioned, as though Bradbury does not recognize that books themselves are products of a modern technological society which is the purported enemy in Fahrenheit 451 -- as Huntington points out in 'Can Books Convert Dystopia into Utopia?' ... The final section contextualizes Fahrenheit 451 in the early 1950s, stressing McCarthyism and the Cold War. Finally, Richard Widmann presents evidence from the decades following the '50s that 'we see the events of Bradbury's science fiction novel coming to pass every day' not only through the operations of authoritarian regimes but also through the more subtle pressures of conformist society and political correctness."

McGiveron, Rafeeq O. The Explicator 54.3 (Spring 1996): 177-80. Expanded Academic
"Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 revolved around the imagery of hands and what they are capable of with or without the guidance of sufficient thought. The hands of Montag and the characters act on their own volition and only when Montag has decided to do good did his hands reflect his intentions and started to follow through. Bradbury's preference for the anxiety commonly associated with intentions to do good is preferable over the deceptive calm akin to non-adherence to the dictates of conscience. Bradbury uses imagery of hands, making them significant reflectors of conscience. The hands of the misguided are deceptively calm, reflecting the complacency of self-righteousness. At the same time, the hands of the character struggling for right seem to do good almost of their own volition, even before the mind has been consciously decided. Finally, once characters are committed to positive action, their hands become an unambiguous force for good. Montag visits Faber, a former literature professor, to try to enlist the old man's help. When Faber initially refuses, Montag holds out a Bible and "lets" his hands shock Faber into action: 'Montag stood there and waited for the next thing to happen. His hands, by themselves, like two men working together, began to tip the pages from the book. The hands tore the fly leaf and then the first and then the second page ... Montag ... let his hands continue.' (88) ... Though Montag still has trouble accepting responsibility for breaking away from the thoughtless destruction which had been his way of life, Bradbury significantly uses the word conscience again.... Beatty forces Montag to burn down his own house. As Beatty berates him and threatens to track down Faber, Montag finds himself 'twitch[ing] the safety catch on the flame thrower' (119). Again, Bradbury has the conscience drive the hands onward ... : 'Montag ... himself glanced to his hands to see what new thing they had done. Thinking back later he could never decide whether the hands or Beatty's reaction to the hands gave him the final push toward murder' (119).... Bradbury writes, 'And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him' (119).... The abrupt transformation of Beatty and the placement of Montag toward the end of the sentence emphasize the spontaneity of the action.... Bradbury has Montag think moments later in his flight, 'Beatty wanted to die' (122). Though Montag would not have killed Beatty willingly, his hands expressed what he consciously understands only later: '[B]urn them or they'll bum you.... Right now it's as simple as that' (123)."

_____. "'To Build a Mirror Factory': The Mirror and Self-Examination in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39.3 (Spring 1998): 282-87. Expanded Academic
"The mirror and self-examination are important in novelist Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. All through the book Bradbury emphasizes the necessity of using a metaphorical mirror. Granger, the leader of the book-memorizing intellectuals, ties together the other mirror imagery, which appears throughout the book as mirrors of one kind are another are missed, found, seen, used. Self-examination is seen as a major part of avoiding self-destruction. In Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury creates an unthinking society so compulsively hedonistic that it must be atom-bombed flat before it ever can be rebuilt. Bradbury's clearest suggestion to the survivors of America's third atomic war 'started... since 1990' (73) is 'to build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors ... and take a long look in them' (164).... After a book burning, Guy Montag, the unsettled 'fireman,' knows 'that when he return[s] to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror' (4).... Bradbury uses Clarisse, Guy's imaginative and perceptive seventeen-year-old neighbor, as a metaphorical mirror to begin reflecting truths that Montag otherwise would not see.... He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, 'himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.' (7) Montag thinks of Clarisse again: "How like a mirror ... her face. Impossible, for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you? ... How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?' (11) ... Clarisse also serves as a mirror held up to the rest of society.... Montag finally sees himself by looking into the mirror of the other firemen: 'These men were all mirror images of himself!' (33) ... Swift's Gulliver's Travels ... is excellent for the well-read reader, not for Montag. The firehouse mirror and the mirror that is Millie are missed opportunities because Montag does not look hard enough, but this book-mirror may be too subtle for him even to recognize.... Finally, of course, Bradbury lets Montag stumble on a literary mirror that he, and even others, can recognize. When Guy reads Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' to Millie's friends, he holds up a mirror that reflects all too clearly.... In the very last scene of the novel, Montag holds up the Bible as a mirror in which to see the world from a different perspective.... Ecclesiastes is a mirror providing some comfort, but Montag senses that Revelation is an even better one: 'And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations' (165) Like Mrs. Phelps, he sees his own situation reflected in a piece of literature, but there the mirror brings hope rather than despair.... Granger, leader of the book-memorizing intellectuals whom Montag meets after his flight from the city, ties together all the other uses of mirror imagery. 'Come on now, we're going to build a mirror factory first and turn out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long took in them' (164)."

Trout, Paul. "Fahrenheit 451 Revisited." National Forum 81.2 (Spring 2001): 3. Expanded Academic
"Usually regarded as a novel about censorship, Fahrenheit 451 is more about the triumph of mindlessness, or what Alexander Pope called Dullness. The story focuses on Montag, a 'Fireman' who burns books because the people want books burned. As Beatty, the Fire Chief, explains, mass culture slowly discredited books, replacing their hard-earned and sometimes disturbing messages with 'fun' experiences, such as interactive soap operas telecast on 'four walls.' Because books disturb people by posing questions and contradicting each other, it is up to the Firemen to not 'let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world.' ... The Fire Chief explains, 'With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual" became the swear word it deserved to be.' Flattening all minds to the same low level eliminates 'our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior.'"

Wetzel, Eric. "The Firebrand: Fifty Years After its Publication, Ray Bradbury's Classic Fahrenheit 451 Shows No Sign of Flaming Out." Book 30 (Sept-Oct 2003): 34-35. Expanded Academic
"Ray Bradbury was a teenager sitting in a Los Angeles movie theater when he first saw newsreel footage of the Nazis burning books on the streets of Berlin. That moment is often noted as the earliest inspiration for Fahrenheit 451, his monumental 1953 novel about a future world where reading is outlawed.... The book was written during an era when 'pro-communist' literature and left-leaning writers, actors and other public figures were under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The author was a member of the Screen Writers Guild, a prime target of McCarthy and his allies, and some critics have suggested that the anticommunist mania galvanized the normally apolitical Bradbury even more than his memories of the previous decade's fascists.... The Chicago of the novel is filled with devices we now call automated teller machines, and its police chases are televised. One of the book's other prophecies was self-fulfilling: The Sony engineer who invented the Walkman in the 1970s was reportedly inspired by Bradbury's Seashell radio--a set of in-ear music transmitters favored by Montag's wife, Mildred. And Bradbury even hinted at the rise of political correctness: In explaining to Montag how books came m be banned, Beatty says that the media became less and less adept at dealing with the controversies caused whenever 'the minor minor minorities' became offended at something in print. Authors, he claims, 'locked up' their typewriters out of fear."