How long has montag been a fireman

Then, when he responds to an alarm that an old woman has a stash of hidden literature, the woman shocks him by choosing to be burned alive along with her books.

A few days later, he hears that Clarisse has been killed by a speeding car. When Montag fails to show up for work, his fire chief, Beatty, pays a visit to his house. Soon, books all began to look the same, as writers tried to avoid offending anybody. This was not enough, however, and society as a whole decided to simply burn books rather than permit conflicting opinions. Beatty tells Montag to take twenty-four hours or so to see if his stolen books contain anything worthwhile and then turn them in for incineration.

Montag begins a long and frenzied night of reading. He remembers that he once met a retired English professor named Faber sitting in a park, and he decides that this man might be able to help him understand what he reads. He visits Faber, who tells him that the value of books lies in the detailed awareness of life that they contain. Faber says that Montag needs not only books but also the leisure to read them and the freedom to act upon their ideas.

Faber agrees to help Montag with his reading, and they concoct a risky scheme to overthrow the status quo. Faber will contact a printer and begin reproducing books, and Montag will plant books in the homes of firemen to discredit the profession and to destroy the machinery of censorship.

The women discuss their families and the war that is about to be declared in an extremely frivolous manner. Faber buzzes in his ear for him to be quiet, and Mildred tries to explain that the poetry reading is a standard way for firemen to demonstrate the uselessness of literature.

The women are extremely disturbed by the poem and leave to file a complaint against Montag. Montag goes to the fire station and hands over one of his books to Beatty.

Beatty confuses Montag by barraging him with contradictory quotations from great books. Drawn to the lights and conversation of the McClellan family next door, he forces himself to remain at home, yet he watches them through the French windows. Through his friendship with Clarisse McClellan, Montag perceives the harshness of society as opposed to the joys of nature in which he rarely partakes. When Clarisse teases him about not being in love, he experiences an epiphany and sinks into a despair that characterizes most of the novel.

He suffers guilt for hiding books behind the hall ventilator grille and for failing to love his wife, whom he cannot remember meeting for the first time. But even though he harbors no affection for Mildred, Montag shudders at the impersonal, mechanized medical care that restores his dying wife to health. Montag's moroseness reaches a critical point after he witnesses the burning of an old woman, who willingly embraces death when the firemen come to burn her books.

His psychosomatic illness, a significant mix of chills and fever, fails to fool his employer, who easily identifies the cause of Montag's malaise — a dangerously expanded sensibility in a world that prizes a dulled consciousness. Lured by books, Montag forces Mildred to join him in reading. His hunger for humanistic knowledge drives him to Professor Faber, the one educated person that he can trust to teach him.

Following the burning of the old woman, his company's first human victim, Montag faces an agonizing spiritual dilemma of love and hate for his job. As a fireman, he is marked by the phoenix symbol, but ironically, he is inhibited from rising like the fabled bird because he lacks the know-how to transform intellectual growth into deeds.

After he contacts Faber, however, Montag begins a metamorphosis that signifies his rebirth as the phoenix of a new generation. A duality evolves, the blend of himself and Faber, his alter ego. With Faber's help, Montag weathers the transformation and returns to his job to confront Captain Beatty, his nemesis. He asks if firemen ever prevented fires, and two other firemen take out their rule books and show him where it says the Firemen of America were established in by Benjamin Franklin to burn English-influenced books.

Then the alarm sounds, and they head off to a decayed, old house with books hidden in its attic. They push aside an old woman to get to them. Even after they spray the books with kerosene, the woman refuses to go. Beatty starts to light the fire anyway, but Montag protests and tries to persuade her to leave. She still refuses, and as soon as Montag exits, she strikes a match herself and the house goes up in flames with her in it. The firemen are strangely quiet as they ride back to the station afterward.

So it was the hand that started it all. His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arm. His hands were ravenous. The Mechanical Hound continues the paradoxical theme of living but not Living. Like Mildred and the snakelike machine that pumps her stomach, the Hound is simultaneously like and not like a living thing. It is unlike a real dog in that it is made of metal and has eight legs and a needle in its muzzle that extends and administers a lethal dose of anesthetic.

Montag is conscious of feeling vaguely guilty around Beatty, but he does not know the exact origin of his feeling.

In this section, Montag begins to feel alienated from the other firemen. He realizes suddenly that all the other firemen look exactly like him, with their uniforms, physiques, and grafted-on, sooty smiles. This is simply a physical manifestation of the fact that his society demands that everyone think and act the same. He used to bet with the other firemen on games of releasing animals for the Hound to catch and kill, but now he just lies in his bunk upstairs and listens every night.