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, who burns books in order to repress free thought and so protect the status quo.

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 — a destroyer of books and the knowledge therein — and never wonders about his role as a tool of thought suppression.

However, several events cause him to question his existence:

• First, he meets an old man in the park, who is later identified as Faber. After talking with him, Montag begins hiding books in his house.
• Second, he meets 17-year-old Clarisse McClellan while walking home from his work. He talks with her and is amazed at how she's different from the hedonistic materialist society everyone lives in.
• Third, he has a call to go to a house owned by an old lady who, rather than be led out of the house before it is burned, decides to set the fire herself, and burn alive inside the house.

His wife, meanwhile, is being fed on the mass-produced entertainment and soap operas, and reacts badly to her husband's desire to read books. 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 runs as a fugitive to Faber, pursued by a Mechanical Hound, a robot with the intent of killing him. Escaping into the river, he joins the 'book people' outside the city. 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.