Fahrenheit 451: Analysis of Destruction and Rebirth
Destruction and Rebirth in Fahrenheit 451
As the city is destroyed (“as quick as the whisper of a scythe the war was finished”), Montag’s thoughts return to Millie. He imagines what the last moments of her life must have been like. He pictures her looking at her wall television set. Suddenly, the television screen goes blank, and Millie is left seeing only a mirror image of herself. Montag imagines that just before her death, Millie finally sees and knows for herself how superficial and empty her life has been. And, in that instant, Montag recalls when he met her: “A long time ago” in Chicago. His former life seems like only a dream.
A new day begins, and a fire providing the commune warmth and heat for cooking is made. Granger looks into the fire and realizes its life-giving quality as he utters the word “phoenix.” The phoenix, he says, was “a silly damn bird” that “every few hundred years” built a pyre “and burned himself up.” Granger imagines the bird as “first cousin to Man” because the bird continually went through rebirth only to destroy himself again. The mythology of fire surrounding this ancient bird is strategic to the lessons of Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury alludes to the phoenix repeatedly in the novel. The firemen wear an emblem of the phoenix on their chests; Beatty wears the sign of the phoenix on his hat and drives a phoenix car. When Beatty is burned to death, his death by fire prepares for a rebirth that the phoenix sign traditionally symbolizes. Montag’s destruction of Beatty ultimately results in his escape from the city and his meeting with Granger. All of these actions lead to a rebirth of a new and vital life. Montag’s new life is filled with hope and the promise of a new era of humanism, depicted in the words that Montag recalls from the Bible: “To everything there is a season. A time to break down, a time to build up.”
With Granger leading the way, the commune heads toward the city to help those who may need them. It is a curious moment, but characteristic of Bradbury. In his novel The Martian Chronicles, for example, people flee the Earth and head for Mars because they are sure that Earth is going to be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. However, when the transplanted Earth people hear that the holocaust has occurred, they return to Earth immediately because they know that it no longer exists as they remember it. This movement is repeated at the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451. Montag flees the city only to return after its destruction. Although altruistically compelled to lend aid to the survivors (of which there were very few), Montag (and the others) seems to have some ritualistic need to return to the city from which they escaped. Even though they escaped the city for political reasons, its familiarity nonetheless remains psychologically comforting. The implication is that, in the death of someone or something that you fiercely hate, you also lose an essential part of your identity.
Fahrenheit 451 is explicit in its warnings and moral lessons aimed at the present. Bradbury believes that human social organization can easily become oppressive and regimented unless it changes its present course of suppression of an individual’s innate rights through censorship. The degenerated future depicted in Fahrenheit 451 represents the culmination of dangerous tendencies that are submerged in your own society. At the very least, the book asserts that the freedom of imagination is a corollary of individual freedom.
The title that Bradbury gives to Part Three alludes to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.” Many interpret this poem, from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, as a meditation about the origin of evil in the world.
The first four lines of the poem are:
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In Blake’s poem, the tiger is often considered a symbol for a world in which evil is at work; it speaks also of the dual nature of all existence. Appropriately, Part Three’s title, “Burning Bright,” serves a dual function: It summarizes the situation at the conclusion of the book. Even while the city burns brightly from the war’s destruction, the spirit of the commune also brightly burns, signifying a future of hope and optimism.