An Ordinary Kitchen Match
In Part I of Fahrenheit 451, “The Hearth and the Salamander,” Ray Bradbury invites the reader into an inverted nightmare, a futuristic dystopia where everything is fireproof save book paper and the fireman’s job is to locate the contraband and burn it to cinders. The alarm sounds and Montag takes his first journey in the story to “a flaking three-story house in the ancient part of the city” (p. 35). The alarm had been turned in by telephone and the woman Montag encounters fiercely resists their efforts to locate and burn her books. When invited to leave, she refuses and, instead, produces an ordinary kitchen match (p. 39), from which the firemen flee in panic. No one is going to burn the books that have become part of her soul. She strikes the match herself. Bradbury’s dark prophecy of censorship and doom is also a compelling narrative of personal courage and sacrifice. Beginning with the subversive questioning of Clarisse (pp. 6-10), the dignified statement of conscience by the book-lover with the kitchen match (pp. 35-40), the mentoring of Montag by Faber through-out the narrative, and the humility and inspiration of the ‘book people,’ Bradbury paints countless portraits of personal courage in the face of utter despotism. [Thesis Sentence]