Theme handout

Censorship diminishes individual thought

Timeline:

1. Montag met Clarisse and she changed the way he thinks. She made him more curious about the society.
2. After they burned the old lady and her house Montag started to question the procedure that the firefighters use. Also while Montag was in the house, he took a book from her house.
3. Montag pretended to be sick from the nervousness from stealing the book. He planned on involving Mildred with his crime. He had a change of heart towards Beatty.
4. Montag decided to go to Faber after numerous events in which he found a bible and exposed himself to Mildred, and wanted someone to help him in his new way of thinking.
5. Montag returned home to find Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps at his house. They angered him when they talked lightly about their husbands which caused him to recite Dover Beach despite Faber telling him otherwise causing Bowles and Phelps to storm off distraught and Mildred cursing him.
6. After the reciting of the poem, the call for a burning was actually for Montag’s house. At that time Montag and Beatty confront each other, causing Beatty to take out the device Faber used to communicate. The two fought until it came to gruesome end in which Montag burned Beatty before the hound came, for that is what is Beatty wished.
7. After this incident, Montag had officially became a convict. He had planted a book into one of his colleague’s home and had made the run for it after he learned that the hound was nothing but accurate. When Montag finally made it to the forest he had noticed a fire in a way in which he never had before and met the intellectuals/book people, who had noticed who Montag was and welcomed him. Shortly after meeting they were met with the site of the city’s aftermath from being bombed.

• The theme helps us understand the censorship that affects their everyday thoughts and opinions on society and law.

• Censorship still occurs today because children’s programs are censored of adult content.

Quotes:

“Are you happy?” she said. “Am I what?” he cried. But she was gone…” (Bradbury 8)

“Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line and his voice went out across the desert into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.” (Bradbury 97).

“And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling gibbering manikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him...Beatty flopped over and over and over, and at last twisted in on himself like a charred wax doll and lay silent.” (Bradbury 113).