Essay

  Montag throughout the story has been very dynamic and showing change from the beginning of the story to the end. Throughout the story Montag is faced with many different problems from which he is shown the reality of life. It all starts when he meets this girl Clarisse and she asks him "are you happy" and Montag in his mind says "of course I'm happy". Later that evening as he steps into his cold empty house and then goes into his bedroom and feels the emptiness in there too. Montag then suddenly realizes that "he was not happy" and that "he wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask".
  Montag changed after realizing he wasn't happy and started to think about it more. Then Montag walks into his bedroom where he finds that Mildred had overdosed on sleeping pills. "Montag was cut in half ". "He felt his chest chopped down and split apart". Montag after calling for doctors and having Mildred's stomach pumped and he wishes that machine could have "taken her mind along to the dry cleaners. Montag feels sad that Mildred is sad and that everyone around him is sad.
  Then Montag who is a firemen then goes to the firehouse where the mechanical hound starts to growl at him. Captain Beatty tells Montag that it is impossible for the hound to be threat. Later Montag continues to meet up with Clarisse and start learn more. Then one day Montag is told by his wife that Clarisse's family had moved and that she had died but Mildred says it in a weird way. At the firehouse an alarm goes off and they case about woman on her porch reciting Hugh Latimer. Montag while in the house grabs a book before they tell the woman that she can either die with her books or with out them. The woman chooses to die with her books which really affects Montag because the next day he is feels sick and doesn't want to be a firemen anymore.
  Captain Beatty tells Montag that every firemen goes through something like this but Montag still isn't fine at all about it. Montag feels worse about it because he then tells his wife but she doesn't seem to care. Later in the story Montag begins to like reading books so he decides to find a teacher so  goes to a guy named Faber. They have a conversation about books and Faber tells Montag "it's not the books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books". This shows Montag that burning books is the wrong thing to do so they start plotting a plan to destroy the system.
  Later Montag has to put up with Mildred's friends but instead he reads poetry to them and make them cry. Beatty then starts to taunt Montag with contradictory quotes which then leads to the firemen going to Montag's house. Montag in his head has many emotions about being forced to burn his house in which he had good memories in. So the heat of all this Montag then kills Beatty out of frustration. Montag flees the scene and has lots of thinking to do about what he has to do.
  So in the end Montag throughout the story has changed in many ways during the story. In a way he was a mindless person not even second guessing what he was doing. But in the end Montag realizes that there is more to life than just burning books. Burning books was like burning away knowledge and Montag in the process of preserving knowledge then changes himself. At the end Montag escapes the city which has been bombed and has found a group of survivors who love to recite books. Montag decides to be like them and follows them but notices that the group had fallen behind him. Montag then goes aside to let Granger pass but Granger nods him on. This to me shows that the group thinks of Montag as a leader. So in conclusion I think that Montag has gone from being a sheep in the herd to being the Shepard.