When he sees the fire in the distance, the reader sees the profound change that Montag has undergone. Montag sees the fire as “strange,” because “It was burning, it was warming.” This fire doesn’t destroy but heals, and by doing so, it draws Montag to the company of his fellow outcasts, book burners of a different sort.
Curiously, Granger was expecting Montag, and when he offers him “a small bottle of colorless fluid,” Montag takes his final step toward transformation. Not only is Montag garbed in clothes that are not his, but the chemical that Granger offers him changes his perspiration. Literally, Montag becomes a different man.
When Montag expresses his prior knowledge of the Book of Ecclesiastes, Granger is happy to tell Montag of his new purpose in life: Montag will become that book. Not only does Montag learn the value of a book, but he also learns that he can “become the book.”
Talking with Granger and the others around the fire, Montag gains a sense of warmth and personal well-being and recovers a sense of faith in the future. He begins gaining an understanding of the fire of spirit, life, and immortality, as well as forgetting the fire that destroys. Notice that when the campfire is no longer necessary, every man lends a hand to help put it out. (“We are model citizens, in our own special way,” Granger says.) This action is further proof of the things that Granger has been telling Montag: Group effort is necessary if a positive goal is ever to be reached.
When the commune moves south (due to the war threat), Montag associates Millie with the city, but he admits to Granger that, strangely, he doesn’t “feel much of anything” for her. That part of his life, as well as everything relating to the city, seems distant and unreal. He feels sorry for her because he intuitively knows that she will probably be killed in the war. He is also ashamed, because in all their years together, he was able to offer her nothing.
As the city is destroyed (“as quick as the whisper of a scythe the war was finished”), Montag’s thoughts return to Millie. He imagines how the last moments of her life must have been. He pictures her looking at her wall television set. Suddenly, the television screen goes blank, and Millie is left seeing only a mirror image of herself. Montag imagines that just before her death, Millie finally sees and knows for herself how superficial and empty her life has been. And, in that instant, Montag recalls when he met her: “A long time ago” in Chicago. His former life seems like only a dream.
A new day begins, and a fire providing the commune warmth and heat for cooking is made. Granger looks into the fire and realizes its life-giving quality as he utters the word “phoenix.” The phoenix, he says, was “a silly damn bird” that “every few hundred years” built a pyre “and burned himself up.” Granger imagines the bird as “first cousin to Man” because the bird continually went through rebirth only to destroy himself again. The mythology of fire surrounding this ancient bird is strategic to the lessons of Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury alludes to the phoenix repeatedly in the novel. The firemen wear an emblem of the phoenix on their chests; Beatty wears the sign of the phoenix on his hat and drives a phoenix car. When Beatty is burned to death, his death by fire prepares for a rebirth that the phoenix sign traditionally symbolizes. Montag’s destruction of Beatty ultimately results in his escape from the city and his meeting with Granger. All of these actions lead to a rebirth of a new and vital life. Montag’s new life is filled with hope and the promise of a new era of humanism, depicted in the words that Montag recalls from the Bible: “To everything there is a season. A time to break down, a time to build up.”
With Granger leading the way, the commune heads toward the city to help those who may need them. It is a curious moment, but characteristic of Bradbury. In his novel The Martian Chronicles, for example, people flee the Earth and head for Mars because they are sure that Earth is going to be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. However, when the transplanted Earth people hear that the holocaust has occurred, they return to Earth immediately because they know that it no longer exists as they remember it. This movement is repeated at the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451. Montag flees the city only to return after its destruction. Although altruistically compelled to lend aid to the survivors (of which there were very few), Montag (and the others) seems to have some ritualistic need to return to the city from which they escaped. Even though they escaped the city for political reasons, its familiarity nonetheless remains psychologically comforting. The implication is that, in the death of someone or something that you fiercely hate, you also loose an essential part of your identity.
Fahrenheit 451 is explicit in its warnings and moral lessons aimed at the present. Bradbury believes that human social organization can easily become oppressive and regimented unless it changes its present course of suppression of an individual’s innate rights through censorship. The degenerated future depicted in Fahrenheit 451 represents the culmination of dangerous tendencies that are submerged in your own society. At the very least, the book asserts that the freedom of imagination is a corollary of individual freedom.
The title that Bradbury gives to Part Three alludes to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.” Many interpret this poem, from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, as a meditation about the origin of evil in the world. The first four lines of the poem are:
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In Blake’s poem, the tiger is often considered a symbol for a world in which evil is at work; it speaks also of the dual nature of all existence. Appropriately, Part Three’s title, “Burning Bright,” serves a dual function: It summarizes the situation at the conclusion of the book. Even while the city burns brightly from the war’s destruction, the spirit of the commune also brightly burns, signifying a future of hope and optimism.
