One of the final scenes in Fahrenheit 451 has been on my mind lately. Near the end of the novel, Montag is driven in anger to kill his former boss Captain Beatty by burning him to death. While on the run from the police and robot dog, Montag reflects on killing his former friend.
“Beatty wanted to die. In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to die. He had just stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, needling, thought Montag, ......How strange, strange, to want to die so much that you let a man walk around armed and then instead of shutting up and staying alive, you go on yelling at people and making fun of them until you get them mad,” -Bradbury, pg. 116.
Could it be true? Could Beatty have wanted Montag to kill him at that moment in front of his house? If so, why would he do that after trying to convince Montag to stay away from books and the potential threat they impose on society?
I find Fire Chief Beatty to be the most interesting character in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. He is constantly portrayed as the logical extreme foil for Guy. While Montag is unhappy and ignorant of the world around him until the intervention of Clarisse, Beatty is unhappy while having to be a well-read man in a society that has conditioned him to burn books for the greater good of society. Practically every single conversation between the two men until his death had been Beatty using his above-average intellect to convince Guy that books and the ideas of the division they can spread are a detriment to their way of life.
"It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you, in slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger, you'll drown!"
-Bradbury, pg. 111-112
Beatty never claims that he’s never read books. Far from it. He’s possibly the most well-read character aside from the traveling scholars Montag joins up with at the end of the novel. Beatty clearly at some point had a love of books, writing, and literature, but at some point along the way decided that the security, cooperation, and universal control of society was more important than intellectual freedom. In his mind, books open the possibility of human discourse. The more well-read someone is, the more likely they will form their own opinions, which will lead to disagreements, which will ultimately lead to the utter collapse of human civilization.
"What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
-Bradbury, pg. 59
In my honest opinion, the reason that Montag thinks that Beatty wanted him to kill him was to prove him wrong. Beatty sees the desire for knowledge and his wanting to change the status quo in Montang, and wants to show him the result of giving up on free ideas and individuality. Beatty often taunts Montag with the idea that fire is a source of purification and rebirth and “destroys responsibility and consequences”. At the end of the novel, the idea of the mythical phoenix bird is brought up. A symbol of rebirth and purification. Beatty wanted Guy to use the fire he so loved to purify him of his sins as a fireman. A book burner. The cause of so much intellectual destruction.
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