Shmoop - Fahrenheit 451

The 1991 Ballentine edition of this book made the meaning of the title pretty obvious with an addendum to the title: "Fahrenheit 451...the temperature at which books burn." This is followed shortly by: "The novel of firemen who are paid to set books ablaze." That pretty much covers it.

Cycles come up a lot in Fahrenheit 451 - cycles of construction and destruction. Until he breaks free from his life as a fireman, all Montag knows is the latter. His job, his world, his entire life is about violence, death, elimination. Fire is a great example; it's used only to destroy books, people, and houses.
So it's a big deal when, towards the end of the novel, Guy finds a fire that is doing something positive. It's a warming fire, he realizes with awe. It's giving life, not taking it away. Montag has stumbled onto a big idea here - the constructive/destructive duality - but it's Granger who fleshes it out in the last few pages. Like all of life, he explains, mankind's presence on this planet is cyclical. We'll do this all repeatedly, he says - go through another Dark Age and have to rebuild and flourish all over again. When the city is bombed to the ground, it is with hope that Montag reaches towards it, finally aware of this big cycle and finally accepting it.
Which brings us to the final paragraph of the novel: the tree of life. Guy has been trying for at least fifty pages to remember some passage of the Bible, but it's not until his world is destroyed that the words come back to him. Makes sense, right? Something is destroyed, but something is created at the same time. More cycles, more duality. It's appropriate that the passage in question is about the tree of life. As Guy remembers from the text, "To everything there is a season. A time to break down, and a time to build up." And we see both in the final pages of the novel.

As critic after critic has pointed out, the prose of Fahrenheit 451 is less than literary fiction: "Her face was slender and milk-white, and it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with a tireless curiosity. It was a look of almost pale surprise; the dark eyes [our italics]" were probably full of several more noun-adjective pairs. While this novel isn't praised for its sentence construction, it's famous today for its story, its message, its important questions and incredibly relevant concerns.

It's probably remants from his hardcore science fiction days, but Bradbury shows a clear flair for intensity here. Characters are extreme rather than realistic (Clarisse is the kooky yet wise outsider, Beatty the secretly intellectual, moustache-donning-villain, Mildred the vacant wife, Faber the reluctantly rebellious ex-professor, etc.). Events are apocalyptic (big fires, lots of bombs), and confrontations exist only on the grandest of scales (cars swerving to hit pedestrians, the occasional flame-thrower murder).

While the narrative is third person, it's limited to Guy Montag. We spend a good amount of time in his brain hearing his thoughts, learning who he is, and understanding his many, many personal crises. This keeps us on his side and allows us insights into the world of Fahrenheit 451 we would otherwise have been denied.

As you might expect from a novel about burning books, there's a whole lot of fire in Fahrenheit 451. We're not just talking about the burning houses, either. When people are angry, they're burning with rage inside. When Montag senses Clarisse's presence, it's because he feels body heat. When Granger and Co. pick themselves up after the bombing, we get the image of a phoenix rising up from the ashes. This imagery is all over the place.
Fire seems to mean a lot of different things at different moments in