Guy Montag

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Guy Montag is the central character in Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451. He makes his living as a fireman in a futuristic American city. Ironically, firemen in Montag's America burn books.

Montag is portrayed by Oskar Werner in the film version.

At the opening of the novel, he is happy in his work as a fireman — destroying books and sending book hoarders to mental hospitals — and never wonders about his role as a tool of thought suppression.

However, several events cause him to question his existence:

• First, he meets 17-year-old Clarisse McClellan while walking home from work. His talks with her are thought-provoking and assuage Montag's loneliness. Her death spurs him into becoming a radical.
• Second, he discovers his wife dying from an overdose of sleeping pills. The callous behaviour of the paramedics makes him feel very alienated, while his wife's emptiness disturbs and angers him.
• Third, he has a call to go to a house owned by an old woman who, rather than be led out of the house before it is burned, decides to set the fire herself, and burn alive.
• Fourth, he meets an old man in the park, who is later identified as an English professor. After talking with him, Montag begins hiding books in his house.

Over the course of the novel, Montag becomes increasingly disillusioned with the hedonistic and unthinking society around him. Bradbury emphasizes that the U.S. government, in burning books, is merely expressing the will of a people whose short attention spans, indifference, and hedonism have gradually eroded any semblance of intellectualism from public life. Schools no longer teach the humanities, children are casually violent, and adults are constantly distracted by "seashells" (small audio devices resembling earbuds) and insipid television programs displayed on wall-sized screens. Authors and readers are regarded as ridiculously pretentious, and dangerous to the well-being of society.

After an incident where Montag tries to read to his wife's friends when they are visiting, his wife denounces their house as book possessing, and disappears from the novel. Montag's fire chief, Beatty, tries to persuade him that books are evil, and urges him to return to the unthinking fireman mentality, but Montag refuses, and sets Beatty and the whole house on fire.

He becomes a fugitive, pursued by a Mechanical Hound, a robot with the intent of killing him. He escapes into a river, and joins a group of former professors and writers outside the city, living as hobos. They memorize books, with the intent of having them written down one day when the world has come to its senses. They finish the book heading north, while jet bombers scream overhead.

[edit] Trivia

• Gui Montag, a flamethrower-wielding character (a firebat) in Starcraft, is named after Montag.
• Bradbury notes that he found, after the book was published, that Montag is the name of a paper company. The name is also the opposite of "Girl Friday" (from a movie about many newspaper reporters) - Montag being Monday in German.

• Guy Montag is a radio caller in the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The voice is played by hacker Guy Montag (GMontag on Slashdot.org) who was a sometimes volunteer for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine events, like H.O.P.E. and frequented the Washington, DC 2600 meetings. Recruited by Lazlow Jones after working as a security volunteer at The Fifth H.O.P.E., Guy Montag was sent his lines (written by Lazlow Jones) via electronic mail and read the lines the next day, using a vintage, carbon microphone, rotary dial Princess telephone. The handle, Guy Montag, was selected from a favorite list of appropriate fictional characters because it was the first one researched that was not already in use. Other choices included 'Harry' Tuttle from Brazil (film) and Emmanuel Goldstein from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• Hacker Guy Montag's running online joke (since 1996) about his "hydrogen powered Jeep" (powered by C8H18, octane) was misused by a reporter for The New Republic to make it (falsely) appear that he actually drives a 'hybrid' of some sort, which gave rise to the term Fairbanksing (consult Google or The Urban Dictionary).