From the first scene in the fire station through burning the
old woman on Elm Street
Summary
Montag reaches down to touch the Mechanical Hound in the
fire station, and it growls at him and threatens him. Montag tells
Captain Beatty what happened and suggests that someone may have
set the Hound to react to him like that, since it has threatened
him twice before. Montag wonders aloud what the Hound thinks about
and pities it when Beatty replies that it thinks only what they
tell it to think, of hunting and killing and so forth. The other
firemen tease Montag about the Hound, and one tells him about a
fireman in Seattle who committed suicide by setting a Hound to his
own chemical complex. Beatty assures him no one would have done
that to Montag and promises to have the Hound checked out. Over
the next week, Montag sees Clarisse outside and talks with her every
day. She asks him why he never had any children and tells him that
she has stopped going to school because it was mindless and routine.
On the eighth day, he does not see Clarisse. He starts to turn back
to look for her, but his train arrives and he heads for work. At
the firehouse, he asks Beatty what happened to the man whose library
they burned the week before. Beatty says he was taken to the insane
asylum. Montag wonders aloud what it would have been like to have been
in the man’s place and almost reveals that he looked at the first line
of a book of fairy tales in the library before they burned it.
He asks if firemen ever prevented fires, and two other
firemen take out their rule books and show him where it says the
Firemen of America were established in 1790 by
Benjamin Franklin to burn English-influenced books. Then the alarm
sounds, and they head off to a decayed, old house with
books hidden in its attic. They push aside an old woman to get to
them. A book falls into Montag’s hand, and without thinking he hides
it beneath his coat. Even after they spray the books with kerosene,
the woman refuses to go. Beatty starts to light the fire anyway,
but Montag protests and tries to persuade her to leave. She still
refuses, and as soon as Montag exits, she strikes a match herself and
the house goes up in flames with her in it. The firemen are strangely quiet
as they ride back to the station afterward.
Analysis
So it was the hand that started it all
. . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arm.
. . . His hands were ravenous.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
The Mechanical Hound continues the paradoxical theme of
living but not Living. Like Mildred and the snakelike machine that
pumps her stomach, the Hound is simultaneously like and not like
a living thing. It is unlike a real dog in that it is made of metal
and has eight legs and a needle in its muzzle that extends and administers
a lethal dose of anesthetic. The possibility that someone
may have purposely set the Hound’s sensors to react hostilely to
Montag foreshadows trouble with an enemy in the fire station, as
does his interaction with Beatty, who seems to suspect that something
is going on with Montag. Montag is conscious of feeling vaguely
guilty around Beatty, but he does not know the exact origin of his
feeling.
In this section, Montag begins to feel alienated from
the other firemen. He realizes suddenly that all the other firemen
look exactly like him, with their uniforms, physiques, and grafted-on,
sooty smiles. This is simply a physical manifestation of the fact
that his society demands that everyone think and act the same. He
used to bet with the other firemen on games of releasing animals
for the Hound to catch and kill, but now he just lies in his bunk
upstairs and listens every night. He begins to question things no
other fireman would ever think of, such as why alarms always come
in at night, and whether this is simply because fire is prettier
then. This explanation makes perfect sense in a society as caught
up in superficial aesthetics as Montag’s and is in keeping with
the novel’s portrayal of book burning as a kind of ghoulish entertainment.
When the firemen find the old woman still in her house at the scene
of the burning, Montag shows a capacity for empathy and compassion
that is uncommon in his society. First, he feels highly uncomfortable,
since he usually only has to deal with the lifeless books, without
human emotions getting involved. Then, though the other men also
seem uncomfortable and try to compensate for her silently accusing
presence with increased activity and talking, Montag tries to convince her
to leave, to save her life.
Beatty’s character becomes more complex here as he speaks
to the woman. He summarizes his reasons for burning books, saying that
none of the books agree with each other and that many are merely
subversive lies about people who never actually lived. He compares
books—which contain thousands of varying opinions—to the Tower of
Babel, the biblical structure that caused the universal human language
to be fragmented into thousands of different voices. Beatty recognizes
that the comment the old woman made when the firemen arrived was
actually a quotation of Hugh Latimer’s words to Nicholas Ridley
as the two of them were about to be burned at the stake as heretics
in sixteenth-century England. This is the first hint of Beatty’s
impressive knowledge of literature.
The question of individual agency arises again when Montag steals
the book. He perceives his crime to be automatic and observes that
it involved no thought on his part, that his hands committed the crime
on their own. Montag’s thoughtless actions here recall Mildred’s
unconscious overdose; both actions result from a hidden sense of
dissatisfaction that neither Mildred nor Montag consciously acknowledges.
