No Fireplace in the Empty Hearth but Caustic Fire
The section opens up with a saddened cadence of Montag’s reading to his wife from one of the books he has salvaged from the caustic fire. The setting is an empty house with barren walls that mirrors the emptiness of their lives. “The family” as Mildred calls her TV shows has been shut down.” The incendiary pace of the first section has suffused after the dramatic self- immolation of an elderly lady who would rather perish than forsake her literary treasures. No hearth is found here: the words Montag reads bounce off in the void of Millie’s soul.
Clarisse, the perceptive young woman, seemed to mirror a younger, more introspective version of Montag in the earlier section. In this one, Faber—the guardian of books—represents a potential vision of an older, wiser Montag. Driven by a frantic search for meaning, Montag embarks on a maddening journey of self-discovery as he strives to save the written word from oblivion.
“Memory like a Sieve”
Montag understands that by memorizing the books he can be the bearer of a holy grail and thus, contribute to save them. Indeed, before handing Beatty his treasured possession of “Ecclesiastes,” he tries to memorize it, but the words slide through his mind, distracted by the clatter of the tube and the disquieting jingles of a toothpaste commercial. Metallic, numbed, nulled … his mind is arrested by the devouring expediency of modern life:
“Guy's modern world counts on this inability to concentrate. This world he lives in without books has encouraged people to live for the immediate moment; it's a world of sound bites and expediency. By filling every place with mindless sound such as the advertisement jingle, people can't concentrate and do any serious thinking. If people can't think, they are much more easily controlled. This is just where society, and the government in the book, want people. By banning books, people's minds have been turned into sieves unable to hold thought.” Source; here
Logos: the first Word
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1). “Word” translated from the Greek “Logos”
Logos / word embodies an unfleshed god that later turned into a human. Following the thread of this metaphor, it is noticeable that the book Montag is trying to memorize is the Bible, the word “par excellence.” Religious metaphors sprinkle “Fahrenheit 451.” Marcial brought to our attention the equation between Montag and St Paul, or the river that will later appear in section three, “Burning Bright,” with the river Jordan. Equally, the Harvard inmates he finds in the river jokingly acknowledge themselves as the Apostles (comments indebted to Marcial).
Montag’s recitation of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach to Mildred’s friends juxtaposes the dark, oppressive world surrounding him—marked by the relentless burning of books and the authoritarian surveillance of citizens—with a world of profound emotion, one that stirs and wrenches the hearts of those who struggle to bear the weight of genuine feeling.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Beatty, the fire brigade captain, humiliates Montag in a verbal duel laden with literary references, leaving Montag unable to respond. Reduced to silence, he succumbs to Beatty's rhetorical dominance, embodying the numbness that defines him throughout the first and second sections of the novel. It is only in the third section, during his journey down the river, that this numbness begins to dissolve in a symbolic act of rebirth (drawing on Marcial’s imagery of the river as a metaphor for renewal). Beatty’s pointed remark:“Who are a little wise, the best fools be” can be traced back to John Donne’s poem The Triple Fool (click on the title to read the full poem):
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry;
But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
If she would not deny?
Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes
Do purge sea water's fretful salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my pains
Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay.
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
It is specially interesting to notice the two last lines where the power of the written word seems to be highlighted, for Donne, the poem will be a memento of his pain because it will be “fettered” in words but it will also be be liberating because as he puts his thoughts in words he will be released of their pain. Montag will be the wise fool because he did what he had to do by acknowledging that the books are more than stitched pieces of paper, they bear the immanence of the thoughts and knowledge of the writers that wrote them.
