Fahrenheit 451 Essay

    Before Montag meets Clarisse, his sixteen-year old neighbor, he's much like a robot who just burns books. The only things he does is go to work, deals with his suicidal wife, and has his own world of technology where watching Tv is all he does at home but he never really notices what he is actually doing. Clarisse gets him out of his "world" and makes him see all the good in life that's around him. Even though she does all of this indirectly, she inspires him to take big steps.

    Like a novelist, Clarisse is aware of the world that she lives in. In conversations with Montag, she shows him how she observes society, loves nature, and reflects off of what she sees. She shares her insights with people while expressing wonderment at the way people talk to each other without actually talking about something meaningful. She shares metaphors comparing the rain to wine and fallen leaves to cinnamon. She displays curiosity about other people's motivations and lives amongst asking Montag whether he is happy or not and whether it's true that firefighters like him once put out fires rather than starting them.

    Getting to know Clarisse inspires Montag to observe the world the way she does. He turns away from his old habits and starts seeing the real world. He starts to wonder about the history of firefighting and he notices that most people care far for more than their television families than they do for their own family members. He then begins to interrogate the ways in which he similar and different than his co-workers. He notices, for example that all the other firemen looks exactly as he does, dark haired and unshaven. At the same time he realizes that his physical resemblance to the other firemen belies the hesitance he feels about performing his job, a hesitance the other firemen don't seem to share.

    Once Montag understands what it means to think like a writer, he has a revolution about what it means to be a writer. He realizes that writers are people who think as Clarisse does and who then organized and shape their thoughts onto paper. As he tells Mildred, it comes to his mind that a man was behind each and every one of those books. A man had to think the books up and had to take a long time to put them down on paper. For most of Montag's adult life, he has only thought of books as physical objects. Thanks to Clarisse, Montag understands that the books he is burning are products of humans. The books represent an individual writers entire life.

    Therefore, Clarisse disappears fairly early in the novel, but she is the key that unlocks Montag. She opens his eyes and inspires him to change. Although she is a very bright teenager, Clarisse is also the closest thing Bradbury has to a representative in the novel. With her passion for observations, she seems the kind of girl who might go on to write a novel.