rator says, "With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black" (3). Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn and is symbolically written on the firemen’s helmets, tanks, and in the firestation.During a moment of revelation Montag comes upon an interesting idea about fire and the burning of books that takes place. He states, "the sun burnt every day. It burnt time…So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt! One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn’t, certainly" (141). With this comment Montag realizes that he can no longer be a book burner, but that he has to preserve books.After this revelation, Montag happens upon fire once again. "That small motion, the white and red color, a strange fire because it meant a different thing to him. It was not burning. It was warming … He hadn’t known fire could look this way" (145-46). Montag was now seeing fire as a nourishing, life giving flame. The title of the third part of the book, "Burning Bright", shows that even while the city is still burning brightly from the war’s destruction, the spirit of all the exile men is also burning brightly. This signifies a future of hope and optimism. Throughout Fahrenheit 451 Montag goes through a transformation from book burner to book preserver. Montag mirrors the path taken by one of prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The prisoner went through a metamorphosis from illusion to wisdom. In the Allegory of the Cave there are many prisoners; all with their arms, legs, and heads shackled so that they could only look forward. This represents how the totalitarian government in Fahrenheit 451 forces everyone to see only the government’s b...
