Pg 145That small motion, the white and red color, a strange fire because it meant a different thing to him. It was not burning. It was warming.
Fire plays a big part in this book Fahrenheit 451. At first, it is portrayed as some kind of evil. The only purpose of fire at the beginning of the story is to burn (mainly books). Firefighters are no longer called firefighters, but firemen. They are not those who hear the alarm and immediately get on to their firetrucks, speeding away to the burning house with a hose pumped up with water, ready to put the fire out. Firemen are just the opposite. They hear an alarm, rush to the house, and set it on fire, burning the house and the books found in that house.
An object is what it is. However, people take the object in their minds and dress it up, styling its hair and designing its shape until it looks like how they want it to look, or how they want it to be. For many people, once it is formed the way it is in their minds, it is very difficult, nearly impossible, for it to transform. This is unless the person has experienced some kind of extraordinary occurance that changed the object by force. For example, imagine a desk. In your mind, it is probably rectangular with four legs and a flat surface, maybe with some books, papers, and even a pencil case. If one day, someone comes along and paints spikes on the smooth surface of your desk, or adds an extra ten feet to its legs. You would think that that person has ruined the desk. This is because the purpose of a desk is to have a smooth surface at the right height when sitting on a chair for a comfortable space to study, but with spikes or if it's too high, it does not serve its purpose. Therefore, you could conclude that after that person added some extra brushstrokes to your painting, the desk is now strange. This is the word Montag uses to describe the small sparks of red and white he saw. They looked familiar. They were familiar. He saw it nearly every day for ten years, but it looked strange because it "meant a different thing to him." It served a different purpose, and therefore it did not match the picture of fire that was already drawn into his mind. "It was not burning. It was warming." All his life, fire served one purpose, and that was to burn. Now, fire served a different objective- to warm. Now, Montag's life is different.
1 comment:
I agree that people often change the meaning or purpose of something. Like it shows in the book, the fire is dressed up as something that kills and burns. However, later, Montag realizes that the purpose of the fire was to warm. Often, we like to alter and fix things to fit them to what we want them to be. For example, dynamite was invented to help the people with mining. The purpose was to break rocks more easily, so people could have an easier time. However, dynamite began to be used in wars, to kill others. Now, the image of a dynamite is often shown as a weapon to kill someone. Another example is the creation of animals. God created animals to be taken care of. However, some people torture and kill animals, for no reason. The purpose of the animals weren’t to be killed and tortured. Even beside this, there are many more cases of people changing the objective of things, and like you said, I think it is really significant that we don’t dress up, style, or change things to suit us.
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