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1)Beatty,
explaining the history of censorship and periods of human education: “Out
of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual
pattern for the past five centuries of more.”
2)Beatty,
touting the role of technology in man’s aim to abolish individual thought:
“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to
think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a mechanical
hour.” 3)The
captain continues by defending the moral aims of the ideal of censorship:
“Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone
made equal.Each man the image of
every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them
cower, to judge themselves against.” 4)Beatty,
explaining the need to cremate the dead to make the living loose their
memory: “Forget them.Burn all, burn
everything.Fire is bright and fire
is clean.” 5)Montag
asserts, “Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave.They
just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!” In this
way, Montag sees books not only as helpful tools, but also as vital agents
of salvation for his diseased world. 6)When
Mrs. Bowles rejects Montag’s “poetry lesson,” the fireman can restrain
himself no longer.He tells her,
“Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband
killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home
and think of the dozen abortions you’ve had, go home and think of that
and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your
guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to
stop it?” 7)Beatty
continues his attack, saying to Montag, “[Fire’s] real beauty is that it
destroys responsibility and consequences.A
problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.Now,
Montag, you’re a burden.And fire
will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later.” 8)Montag
gets the last laugh when he turns to Beatty’s dead body and says, “You
always said, don’t face a problem, burn it.Well,
now I’ve done both. Good-bye, Captain.” 9)Montag realizes his own special role in the rebirth of thinking that must occur if the world is to go on.Bradbury narrates, “Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.” 10)Granger
reflects over the city’s destruction, saying, “We know the damn silly thing
we just did.We know all the damn
silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that
and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making
the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.” He goes on,
“But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use
what we got out of them.”
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