Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Monomyth

In every great novel, there is bound to be a tempest, the best friend, and the grand adventure in which there is bound to be a battle of some sort. The Monomyth and temple pattern has been seen throughout various movies and books around our culture. Fahrenheit 451 is no exception to the pattern. Among the three compilations of The Hearth and the Salamander, The Sieve and Sand, and Burning Bright, we as a reader travel through the monomyth journey alongside Guy Montag to show the adventure’s departure, challenge, and return. In the beginning of the book, The Hearth and the Salamander chapter, the reader is introduced to the main character Guy Montag. Montag is a firefighter who burns books for a living. The call to adventure in the beginning …show more content…
They begin reading when Montag remembers a person that he had met a couple years earlier. Montag is challenged with illegally reading a book in which he could gather a ton of information or conforming to society and keeping his job. Montag meets the ultimate boon of the monomyth pattern in the second part of the book. In the Sieve and the Sand chapter, the main character tries to find hope for his life by reading books. He stumbles across what he believes in the last copy of the Bible. Montag takes a risk and goes to visit Faber. Once there, Faber states “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us”(79). With this, the readers can see that Faber will be the ultimate boon of the story. Faber, just like the ultimate boon of every story is very important to the plot line and outcome of Fahrenheit 451. With Faber helping Montag every step of the way, Montag is able to make it to the third and final part of the monomyth pattern, the …show more content…
By going against his wife, boss, and society, Montag was faced with the choice of either being arrested or not living with the truth of books in his life. He decides to run away and finds a group of outcasts that have memorized certain books in order to keep history alive. From here the city is wiped out and Montag is able to live in a place of gracefulness while he rebuilds the city. “Perhaps later in the morning, when the sun was up and had warmed them they would begin to talk, or just say the things they remembered, to be sure they were there, to be absolutely certain that things were safe in them” (157). Montag was finally safe to speak his mind. Along with the other outcasts, Montag was able to come in and build up the city from ashes. Montag returned to a better version of the original world. He makes his fantasy of being able to read books and enjoy them, a