Examples Of Conflict In Fahrenheit 451

In stories, we often learn a lot about a character by how they deal with conflict. Conflicts are what instigate character development, and the novels Fahrenheit 451 and Learning to Read and Write are great examples of this. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Guy Montag, a "fireman" who lives in a society where burning books is the norm. Frederick Douglass' Learning to Read and Write is the autobiographical story of a slave secretly trying to learn to read and write. Bradbury and Douglass both use the conflicts Person vs. Person, Person vs. Self, and Person vs. Society to develop their characters over the course of their respective texts. When dealing with Person vs. Person, Montag is in conflict with Fire Chief Beatty, and Douglass is in conflict with his mistress. Both antagonists try to keep our protagonists away from books, though for different reasons. Beatty sees the books themselves as the problem, finding them to be full of “conflicting theory and thought.” He believes that

Society conflicts begin. For Montag, the shift in conflict starts when he is visited in his home by Beatty. Beatty tells Montag he has twenty four hours to burn the book he stole, or the he and the rest of the firemen will “simply come and burn it for him.” Montag realizes in this moment that he has changed far too much to ever be able to go back to his old life, thinking “I’ll never come in again” when Beatty asks if he’ll see him at work that night. For Douglass, the shift happened when he met two Irishmen on the wharf, and “they both advised me to run away to the north… and that I should be free.” Both Montag and Douglass make the decision to run away, showing that they’ve both evolved as characters to the point that they no longer feel they can continue to live in their societies thanks to all that they’d learned from the books they had covertly