Autobiographies:
Guy Montag:
I am a fireman. I burn houses and books for a living. I wasn't much of a thinker until I met Clarisse. I didn’t ask questions about the world. I never stopped and tilted my head back and taste the rain. I never was happy. I went to work and came home to my wife Mildred. Life was pretty dull and had the same routine. When I met Clarisse life changed. That one night she was walking around at night alone. I remember from that night is when I ask her how old she was. Her words to me where. “I’m seventeen and crazy.”
Clarisse McClellan
I’m seventeen and crazy. Did you know that there is a man on the moon or that if you tilt your head up when it rains and taste the rain drops they taste like wine? I’m not like most people I ask questions about why things are. I have to go to a therapist to figure out what’s “wrong” with me. I am what you would call a thinker and the government doesn’t like people like me or my family. We are a threat because we question everything the government does. We aren’t mindless drones that live in this world. I don’t go to school because the teachers call me anti-social but really it’s because I’m not like the other kids who don’t care how they are turning. School just fills you up with meaningless facts and doesn’t do anything else. Because I am different the government killed me so I wouldn’t cause any trouble but they were too late I changed the way Guy Montag thinks.
Faber
I'm very old. I would consider myself a coward. I was a professor at a college some forty years ago before the government shut us down. Since then I hid away in my home creating a listening device that fits into your ear where you can hear and talk to other people. A Chinese philosopher once said “To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice” this was me when I didn’t stand up and protest to the government when they started to ban and burn books. If I could go back in time I would have protested more. Books are something meaningful, something with substance and sometihing you can put down and think about. living without books is like living with out water there is no point to living.
Captain Beatty
I have read books, I don’t deny it. But there is no meaning to books. It better they are burned with the crazy people who hide them. Those people are insane to keep the books and they have no right to defy the government. Those thinkers need to be locked up along with all the other criminals like Clarisse who now is dead. The best part about being the captain of a fireman teams is to watch the houses burn and smolder for days at a time. I love the times when the alarm goes off and we find the books and then pump the kerosene onto house and books and with our salamander lighters a flick of a switch, a spark and then whole house goes up in flames. The flames are like hungry monsters shooting up the sides of the house and then the whole building comes crashing down.
Granger
I have a photographic memory. I'm the leader of the few guys Montag ran into. We are outcasts of the recent society. We’ve all lost something, I lost my grandfather but he still lives with me. His knowledge is in my brain. I believe that one day we will be needed again, to be written down to be used again. Until then the stories will remain in my mind and be passed down to the kids. Have them relearn them so when the time comes, when we are needed we will be ready. Until this time comes we will be on the run, the out casts of the society, hiding and waiting for our time to rise up and hopefully there will be more people each generation that remembers a little more of the past so history won’t repeat it’s self.
