Journal: Fahrenheit 451

Knowledge is a powerful thing. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge brings pain. Ignorance brings blind joy. Given the ability to choose, what side of this treacherous coin would you pick? If you choose knowledge, you will be persecuted by the ignorant. If you choose ignorance, you will be persecuted by the knowledgeable. Fahrenheit 451 illustrates this truth about life through the characters. In the end, happiness does not exist in a true form. Nobody has true happiness in this novel. Nobody has true happiness in life.

            How can I believe such a depressing statement? What do I have to support this claim? In the novel, the first hint of unhappiness is in Clarisse, when she asks Guy if he is happy. He replies to himself later that he is so obviously happy, how could he not be? Then he arrives home to find that his wife has attempted suicide. It appears that Mildred is excessively happy with her blindly moronic life throughout the rest of the plot, yet this act and her continuous taking of sleeping pills and her nonstop escaping through her shows reveal that she is not as content as she may seem. Guy’s bliss is shattered, and from that point onward the broken pieces are removed. He grows attached to Clarisse, and then she is gone, killed by the rampant society around her, the society she never conformed to. Montag becomes sick with himself after the woman stays in her burning house. He can’t stand himself. When Beatty comes to visit him, we see that the fire chief is not like the rest of the ignorant humans in the book. He is obviously someone who once loved literature very much. He has an abundance of quotes and lines memorized in his mind. Beatty is perhaps the most intriguing character of them all. On page 122, Montag realizes “Beatty wanted to die.” Beatty was plagued by his knowledge of the Catch-22 he is in, with the rest of his world. He sees that not only is knowledge evil, but so is ignorance. There is no way for him to know which is worse, and so when Montag threatens to kill him, Beatty welcomes this warmly.

             After the publishing of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury wrote a play for the extended revelation of the characters, found in the afterword of the novel. In this revelation, he explains who Beatty is, and why he is. He loved books, devoured their contents. Montag asks what happened, and Beatty responds “Why, life happened to me. Life. The usual. The same. The love that wasn’t quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father—a stampede of elephants, an onslaught of disease. And nowhere, nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff the crumbling wall of the breaking dam to hold back the deluge… and [when I] opened the pages of my fine library books… Blank! Oh, the words were there but they ran over my eyes like hot oil, signifying nothing. Offering no help, no solace, no peace, no harbor, no true love, no bed, no light.” When I finished this book and the afterword, I said aloud “I see myself in Beatty.” It is said that we are all just reflections of each other. When I peer into the mirror of character, I see Beatty grinning at me before he is engulfed in flames. In Beatty, I see myself; a man who once held so much faith in his world, his love, his God. I see the man whose spirit has been broken, a man with nowhere to run, no one to run to. He says “I looked in the mirror and found an old man lost behind the frightened face of a young man, saw hatred there for everything and anything, you name it, I’d damn it…” I see the same betrayed dying soul in Beatty that resides in me. We differ when it comes to blame. Beatty desperately needed something to pour all his hate upon, and he felt books betrayed him, so he took the opportunity. He fails to recognize the true root of our turmoil, the cause of our despair; humanity. Beatty says “Here we go to make the world happy, Montag!” but he fails to recognize that so long as humanity stays and humans live, happiness will be a temporary moment of bliss in life. Love and happiness are here and then they are gone. Why do Beatty and I hate the world? Because we love it. And when you love something that tears itself apart despite all the efforts to keep it together, despite all the love for it, the love is forged into sheer contempt and hatred, yet the love is still reminiscent. This is why Beatty wants to die, for he knows this fact deep within himself, but refuses to bring it into light. The only way to escape the pain of his repressed subconscious is death, and so Beatty takes it.