The Hearth and the Salamander: Part 1
Guy Montag is a fireman in charge of burning books in a grim, futuristic United States. He wears a helmet with the number 451, a black uniform with a salamander on the arm, and a phoenix disc on his chest. On his way home from the fire station, he meets his new neighbor, an "unusual" seventeen-year-old named Clarisse McClellan. She immediately recognizes him as a fireman and proceeds to talk to him. She explains that she is “crazy” and tells him that firemen used to extinguish fires rather than to light them. She asks him about his job and tells him that she comes from a strange family that does such things as talk to each other and walk places (being a pedestrian and reading is against the law).
Clarisse’s strangeness makes Guy nervous, and he laughs repeatedly as if uncontrollably. He cannot help feeling somehow intellectually attracted to her because of her outrageous questions, different lifestyle, observations, and incredible power of identification. She asks him if he is happy and then disappears into her house. Thinking about the question, he enters his house and thinks about this stranger and her comprehension of his life.
Upon returning home, he realizes that he is not happy after all, and that his appearance of happiness up to this point has been a lie. Once home, he finds his wife, Mildred, in bed listening to earplug radios called “Seashells." By his bed, he accidentally kicks an empty bottle of sleeping pills and calls the hospital. Two technicians arrive with a machine that pumps Mildred’s stomach and another that replaces all her poisoned blood with fresh blood. Montag goes outside and listens to the laughter and the voices coming from Clarrisse's brightly lit house. Montag goes inside again and considers all that has happened to him that night. He feels disoriented as he takes a sleep lozenge and dozes off. The next day, Mildred remembers nothing about her attempted suicide and denies it when Montag tries to tell her about it. Instead she insists on explaining the plot of the television parlor “family” programs that she watches endlessly on three full-wall screens.
Montag leaves for work and finds Clarisse outside walking in the rain, catching raindrops in her mouth. She rubs a dandelion under her chin and claims that if the pollen rubs off on her, it means she is in love. She rubs it under Montag’s chin, but no pollen rubs off. She asks him why he chose to be a fireman. He tells her to go along to her appointment with her psychiatrist, whom the authorities force her to see due to her supposed lack of “sociability” and her dangerous inclination toward independent thought.
In the fire station Montag reaches down to touch the Mechanical Hound, and it growls at him and threatens him. Montag tells Captain Beatty what happened and suggests that someone may have set the Hound to react to him like that, since it has threatened him twice before. The other firemen tease Montag about the Hound, and one tells him about a fireman in Seattle who committed suicide by setting a Hound to his own chemical complex. Beatty assures him no one would have done that to Montag and promises to have the Hound checked out.
Over the next week, Montag sees Clarisse outside and talks with her every day. She asks him why he never had any children and tells him that she has stopped going to school because it was mindless and routine. On the eighth day, he does not see Clarisse. He starts to turn back to look for her, but his train arrives and he heads for work. At the firehouse, he asks Beatty what happened to the man whose library they burned the week before. Beatty says he was taken to the insane asylum. Montag wonders aloud what it would have been like to have been in the man’s place and almost reveals that he looked at the first line of a book of fairy tales in the library before they burned it.
He asks if firemen ever prevented fires, and two other firemen take out their rule books and show him where it says the Firemen of America were established in 1790 by Benjamin Franklin to burn English-influenced books. Then the alarm sounds, and they head off to a decayed, old house with books hidden in its attic. They push aside an old woman to get to them. A book falls into Montag’s hand, and without thinking he hides it beneath his coat. Even after they spray the books with kerosene, the woman refuses to go. Beatty starts to light the fire anyway, but Montag protests and tries to persuade her to leave. She still refuses, and as soon as Montag exits, she strikes a match herself and the house goes up in flames with her in it. The firemen are quiet as they ride back to the station afterward.
Montag goes home and hides the book he has stolen under his pillow. In bed, Mildred suddenly seems very strange and unfamiliar to him as she talks about the TV and her TV “family.” He gets into his own bed, which is separate from his wife’s. He asks her where they first met ten years ago, but neither of them can remember. Mildred gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom to take some sleeping pills, and Montag tries to count the number of times he hears her swallow and wonders if she will forget later and take more. He feels terribly empty and realizes that the TV walls stand between him and his wife. He tells Mildred he hasn’t seen Clarisse for four days and asks if she knows what happened to her. Mildred tells him the family moved away and that she thinks Clarisse was hit by a car and killed.
Montag is sick the next morning, and the smell of kerosene makes him vomit. He tells Mildred about burning the old woman and asks her if she would mind if he gave up his job for a while. He tries to make her understand his feelings of guilt at burning the woman, but she will not listen. He tries to convince Mildred by insisting on discussing books and the last time something bothered her, but she resists, it ends when they see Captain Beatty coming up the front walk.
Captain Beatty comes by to check on Montag, saying that he guessed Montag would be calling in sick that day. He tells Montag that every fireman runs into the “problem” he has been experiencing sooner or later, and he relates to him the history of their profession. Part of the story is that photography, film, and television made it possible to present information in a visual form which made reading books less popular. Finally, Beatty says that special-interest groups found so many things in books objectionable that people finally stopped arguing and started burning books.
Mildred’s loses interest while Beatty is talking, and she gets up and begins to tighty up the room. In doing so, she finds the book behind Montag’s pillow and tries to call attention to it, but Montag screams at her to sit down. Beatty pretends not to notice and goes on talking. He explains that eventually the public’s want for easy matter to read so much to the point that only comic books, trade journals remained. Beatty explains that after all houses were fireproofed, the firemen’s job changed from its old purpose of preventing fires to its new mission of burning the books that could allow one person to excel intellectually, spiritually more than others.
Montag asks how someone like Clarisse could exist, and Beatty says the firemen have been keeping an eye on her family because they worked against the schools’ system of homogenization. Beatty reveals that he has had a file on the McClellans’ odd behaviors for years and says that Clarisse is better off dead.
Beatty tells Montag not to forget how important he and other firemen are to the happiness of the world. He tells him that every fireman sooner or later becomes curious about books; because he has read some himself, he can tell that they are useless and contradictory. Montag asks what would happen if a fireman accidentally took a book home with him, and Beatty says that he would be allowed to keep it for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, but that the other firemen would then come to burn it if he had not already done so himself. Beatty gets up to leave and asks if Montag will come in to work later. Montag tells him that he may, but he secretly resolves never to go again.
After Beatty leaves, Montag tells Mildred that he no longer wants to work at the fire station and shows her a secret stock of about twenty books he has been hiding in the ventilator. In a panic, she tries to burn them, but he stops her. He wants to look at them at least once, and he needs her help. He searches for a reason for his unhappiness in the books, which he has apparently been stealing for some time. Mildred is frightened of them, but Montag is determined to involve her in his search, and he asks for forty-eight hours of support from her to look through the books in hopes of finding something valuable that they can share with others. Montag picks up a copy of Gulliver’s Travels and begins reading.
-Jonathan Gonzalez