Fahrenheit 451 - Characters

Characters

• Guy Montag is the protagonist and fireman who presents the dystopia through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, a man in conflict about it, and one resolved to be free of it. Through most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes what he hears. Bradbury notes in his afterword that he noticed, after the book was published, that Montag is the name of a paper company.
• Clarisse McClellan is a 17-year-old girl who walks with Montag on his trips home. She is an unusual sort of person in the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. A few days after their first meeting, she disappears without any explanation, although Mildred tells Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and that her family left following her death. In the afterword of a later edition, Bradbury notes that the film adaptation changed the ending so that Clarisse (who, in the film, is now a 20-year-old school teacher who was fired for being unorthodox) was living with the exiles. Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was so happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
• Mildred Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted to sleeping pills, absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor walls" (flat-panel televisions), and indifferent to the oppressive society around her. Despite Guy Montag's attempts to break her from the spell society has on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and indifferent. After Montag scares her friends away by reading Dover Beach and unable to live with someone who has been hoarding books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and abandoning him. She is described as being very sickly and pale, thanks to dieting, her pill addiction, and the stomach pumping operation she underwent earlier in the story.
• Captain Beatty is Montag's boss. Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books due to their unpleasant content and contradicting facts and opinions. In a scene written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
• Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years regretting that he did not defend books when he saw the moves to ban them. Montag turns to him for guidance, remembering him from a chance meeting in a park some time earlier. Faber at first refuses to help Montag, but later realizes that he is only trying to learn about books, not destroy them. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell.
• Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps are Mildred's friends, and, like Stoneman and Black, below, are representative of the anti-intellectual, hedonistic society presented in the novel. During a social visit to Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives and have a cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands, their children, and politics. Mrs. Phelps has a husband named Pete who was called in to fight in the upcoming war (and believes that he'll be back in a week because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children serves no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a single mother who was married three times—her first husband divorced her, her second one died in a jet accident, and her third one committed suicide by shooting himself in the head—and has two children who don't like or even respect her (which stems from her permissive, often negligent and abusive parenting—Mrs. Bowles brags that her kids beat her up and she's glad that she can hit back). When Montag reads Dover Beach to them, Mrs. Phelps starts crying over how hollow her life is while Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading a "filthy" poem.
• Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents.
• Stoneman and Black are other firemen that are mentioned in the novel, but do not have a large impact on the story. Their main purpose in the novel is to show the reader the contrast between the firemen who do as they're told without question and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in his job, but now realizes how damaging it is to society.