With Faber screaming in his ear to escape, Montag experiences a moment of doubt when Beatty reduces Montag’s book knowledge to pretentiousness: “Why don’t you belch Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob? . . . Go ahead now, you secondhand literateur, pull the trigger.” With the flamethrower in his hand and, in his mind, the seeming futility of ever correcting the ills of society, Montag decides that fire, after all, is probably the best solution for everything. “We never burned right,” he says.
The meaning of Montag’s utterance is open to speculation. At first glance, this statement is about passion: If the firemen have to burn books, they should know the subjects of the books and what information they contain. Or possibly, burning shouldn’t be done simply as a mindless job that one does out of habit, but should be done out of political and ideological convictions. Given the context, however, Montag says his line with the implication that Beatty was wrong to encourage burning when he, Beatty, knew the value of books.
As he turns the flamethrower on Beatty, who collapses to the pavement like a “charred wax doll,” you can note the superb poetic justice in this action. Beatty always preached to Montag that fire was the solution to everyone’s problems (“Don’t face a problem, burn it,” Beatty told him) and Beatty, himself, is burned as a solution to Montag’s problem. Note once again, that in describing Beatty’s death, Bradbury uses the image of a wax doll. The imagery of the wax doll is thus used in Fahrenheit 451 to describe both Beatty and Millie. By using this comparison, Bradbury shows that Beatty and Millie do not appear to be living things; they fit the mold made by a dystopian society. As a result, Beatty is charred and destroyed by the fire that gave purpose and direction to his own life.
Although Montag, who is now a fugitive, feels justified in his actions, he curses himself for taking these violent actions to such an extreme. His discontent shows that he is not a vicious killer, but a man with a conscience.
While Montag stumbles down the alley, a sudden and awesome recognition stops him cold in his tracks: “In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to die. He had just stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, needling, thought Montag, and the thought was enough to stifle his sobbing and let him pause for air.” Instantly, the reader and Montag understand Beatty in a much different light. Montag suddenly sees that, although he always assumed that all firemen were happy, he has no right to make this assumption any longer. Although Beatty seemed the most severe critic of books, he, in fact, thought that outlawing individual thinking and putting a premium on conformity stifled a society. Beatty was a man who understood his own compromised morality and who privately admired the conviction of people like Montag.
In a strange way, Beatty wanted to commit suicide but was evidently too cowardly to carry it out. Bradbury illustrates the general unhappiness and despondency of certain members of society three times before Beatty’s incident: Millie’s near-suicide with the overdose of sleeping pills; the oblique reference to the fireman in Seattle, who “purposely set a Mechanical Hound to his own chemical complex and let it loose”; and the unidentified woman who chose immolation along with her books. People in Montag’s society are simply not happy. Their desire for death reflects a social malaise of meaningless and purposelessness.
When war is finally declared, the hint of doom, which has been looming on the horizon during the entire novel, now reaches a climax. This new development serves as another parallel to the situation in which Montag finds himself. Montag sees his former life fall apart as the city around him faces a battle in which it will also be destroyed.
