Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag: A Maturing Teenage Girl
Imagine a very dramatic group of teenage girls. Each girl looks to the other for what she should do, who she should talk to, who she should like, and so on. She does not think on her own. Depending on who the girls are around at a particular time affects their attitudes. One of the girls befriends an outsider to the group and begins to see things differently. She forms her own opinions, understands her choices, and even goes to the bathroom by herself. Similar to the maturing girl, in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury depicts Guy Montag as a conformist who quickly becomes a rebel then a survivor to demonstrate the influence people have on helping each other grow into stronger individuals. In the beginning of the first chapter of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, conformist Guy Montag is proud of his work as a fireman. The narrator states as the opening line to the book that, “It was a pleasure to burn,” and on the way home from the job he loves, Guy “thought little at all about nothing in particular” (4). Like everyone else in the society described in the novel, Guy is blank-minded, he can not develop personal opinions, and he is completely empty inside. When Guy meets Clarisse, he begins to transform from a conformist to a rebel. As the two walk home together for the first time, she asks him, “Are you happy?” At first,

He accomplishes this by developing other characters like Clarisse and Faber, whose purpose is to change Guy Montag, or characters like Beatty, who is depicted as Montag’s foil. All of this shows how other people, or even a society, often cause one person to flourish into a strong individual, much like a teenage girl growing out of her habits of conforming to other girls in her