Fahrenheit 451 Thoughts

I finished the book early Sunday morning (didn't get around to reading more than 10 pages late late Saturday night). Here's my feeling:

+ I really liked certain ones of the characters Bradbury created. We didn't know much about Montag, and that bothered me, but he was sufficiently "a man of mixed ideals and emotions grappling with his new belief-system in a Black-and-White world" to serve as our unlikely hero. The fire chief Beatty was very fascinating, but I think I could have done without reading the Afterword in my book. (In it, Bradbury gives us a sample of a conversation between Montag and Beatty that didn't make it into the book but did make it into the screenplay or opera or something. It explains why Beatty knows what he knows yet does what he does, and the answer is actually more dissatisfying than being left to figure it out on your own. :\)

+ I thought Bradbury was rather brave to deal with what I felt was a not-so-subtle undertone of marital infidelity and (technical) pedophilia with Montag's thoughts and feelings for the 17-year-old Clarisse. He never quite came out and said that Montag loved the girl, but it was all there. She was very flirtatious, he couldn't stop thinking about her, their dialogues were embarrassingly typical of lovers' dates, he was so depressed when she disappeared, etc. Maybe I was biased into viewing their relationship this way, though, just from the way Bradbury introduced Clarisse to us? (page 7): "[Montag] saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but -- what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle.

+ The scene where Montag confronts Beatty with the kerosene hose was unbelievably intense. Both the anticipatory tension as well as the graphic detail with which Bradbury went on to describe the imagery.

+ You knew, from the moment he introduced it to us, that the Mechanical Hound was going to play a major climactic role in the book. And boy did it ever! Intense!

- The book pretty much died for me once Montag's escape from the Hound was resolved. There really wasn't any need for the last 30 or so pages. It would have sufficed to say a few little blurbs about what would happen next and then "the end." The war was so superficial that I really, really would not have missed the bombing. Sure, it was there and all, but did it really need to be?

- I rediscovered that (despite what my shoddy memory keeps telling me) I dislike Ray Bradbury's writing style. He is too much like me, and I hate it: he finds 3 to 4 different ways to describe the exact same thing. As an example: "He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new." ARGH! Makes me want to pull my hair out. Sentence 1 = Sentence 2, and Sentence 3 is ridiculously convoluted given what it's supposed to be informing us. I feel bad for you guys. And I also realize that if I ever become a writer to any degree, my fanbase will surely be the same people who love Mr. Bradbury's writings.