As Montag runs, his wounded leg feels like a “chunk of burnt pine log” that he is forced to carry “as a penance for some obscure sin.” Again, the imagery of fire is used to suggest purification. The penance Montag must pay is the result of all his years of destruction as a fireman. Even though the pain in his leg is excruciating, he must overcome even more daunting obstacles before he achieves redemption.
Unexpectedly, the seemingly simple task of crossing the boulevard proves to be his next obstacle. The “beetles” travel at such high speeds that they are likened to bullets fired from invisible rifles. Bradbury enlists fire imagery to describe these beetles: Their headlights seem to burn Montag’s cheeks, and as one of their lights bears down on him, it seems like “a torch hurtling upon him.”
After Montag and Faber make their plans for escape, the reader witnesses Faber’s devotion to the plans that he and Montag have made. In choosing to flee to St. Louis to find an old printer friend, Faber also places his life in jeopardy to ensure the immortality of books.
Montag imagines his manhunt as a “game,” then as a “circus” that “must go on,” and finally as a “one-man carnival.” Montag’s thoughts, however, do not mean that he imagines it as something silly or playful, but instead, in his community, he considers everyday experience to be a spectacle.
When Montag escapes to the river, the imagery of water, a traditional symbol of regeneration and renewal (and, for Carl Jung, transformation), coupled with Montag’s dressing in Faber’s clothes, suggests that Montag’s tale of transformation is complete. He has shed his past life and is now a new person with a new meaning in life.
His time spent in the water, accompanied by the escape from the city, serves as an epiphany for Montag’s spirit: “For the first time in a dozen years [that is, since he became a fireman] the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire.” The escape allows Montag—again, for the first time in years—to think. He thinks about his dual roles as man and fireman. “After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river,” the reader is told, “he knew why he must never burn again in his life.” Only human beings are capable of making choices (and, hence, are capable of being moral), and his moral choice is to cease burning.
While floating in the river, Montag suddenly realizes the change that has taken place: “He felt as if he had left a stage behind him and many actors. . . He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.” Montag recognizes that many people, including himself and Beatty, were forced to play an assigned role in their lives. The stage imagery implies that Montag actually realized that he was merely acting for a long period of his life, and that he is now entering into an entirely new stage of life.
Montag emerges from the river transformed. Now in the country, his first tangible sensation—“the dry smell of hay blowing from some distant field”—stirs strong melancholic emotions. Though Montag may be a man who has trouble articulating his feelings, one learns that he is a man of deep emotions. The entire episode of him leaving the river and entering the countryside is evocative of a spiritual transformation. He has sad thoughts of Millie, who is somewhere back in the city, and has a sensuous fantasy of Clarisse; both of which are now associated with the city and a life that he no longer lives, to which he can never return.
Whereas the city was metaphorically associated with a stifling and oppressive technology, the countryside is a place of unbounded possibility, which at first terrifies Montag: “He was crushed by darkness and the look of the country and the million odors on a wind that iced the body.” In his earlier life, recall that Montag could smell only kerosene, which was “nothing but perfume” to him. The forest into which he stumbles is rampant with life; he imagines “a billion leaves on the land” and is overcome by the natural odors that confront him.
To underscore the strangeness of this new environment, Bradbury makes Montag stumble across a railroad track that had, for Montag, “a familiarity.” He is, ironically, more familiar with an environment composed of concrete and steel than he is with grass and trees. Because he is most familiar (and comfortable) with something associated with urban life (the railroad tracks), Montag remembers that Faber told him to follow them—“the single familiar thing, the magic charm he might need a little while, to touch, to feel beneath his feet”—as he moves on.
