Fahrenheit 451 (Checkpoint 6)

I was blown away from this novel. Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451 is a intruiging and thought provoking novel. It is set in the future, which is really today because the book was written in the 1950s. The story is set in a world where everything is the same; conformity is the rule. Education has been limited to just basic necessities; people are not encouraged to think independently or meaningfully, everyone lives in gray houses with no porches, and most importantly: books are burned. Books are considered horrible, nonsensical objects filled with useless information that could tip over the carefully preserved balanced that took two nuclear wars to create. Therefore, people called "firemen" go to houses that are rumored to be hiding books, and burn them down. Firemen no longer put out fires, but instead start them.

The book is centered around a particular fireman, number 451, Guy Montag. One night, after coming home from a successful night of burning hundreds of priceless novels, he meets a young girl who opens his eyes to just how empty and meaningless his life is. He starts questioning the meaning of burning books, and over the next few days goes through a series of disturbing events. Then, Guy Montag knows what he has to do.

The theme of this novel is it is better to be knowledgeable and sad than ignorant and happy. In the beginning, Guy Montag was content to just do his job of burning books.
 "Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course"(Bradbury 8). 
Guy didn't question anything, so he lived comfortably in ignorance. But very early on in the novel, he meets a special girl who leads him to start questioning the world he lives in. I believe this because one of quotes from Fahrenheit 451 is "I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles per hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad, too"(Bradbury 10).
The main character, Guy Montag, is starting to question how drivers go see so many places and new things, yet all they see are blurs, and never question more about the blurs, or stop to see the blurs more clearly. He is beginning to open up. Midway through the book, he opens up even more, by starting to hide books that he finds, instead of burning them. One night, he cannot stand it any longer and starts reading one.
"Montag picked a single small volume from the floor.
"'Where do we begin?" He opened the book halfway and peered at it. "We begin by beginning, I guess'" (Bradbury 68).
He starts reading, and soon realizes what he has done by burning thousands of books everyday. He has gotten rid of all knowledge in the world, and he realizes how wrong that is. The novel ends with him doing something momentous that overturns the balance of his ignorant world, but the knowledge he earned, even though it created extreme difficulty for him, made him, in the end, truly happy.