Fahrenheit 451

He felt one hand and then the other work his coat free and let it slump to the floor. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything”(41). He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall into darkness. He could feel the poison working up his wrists and into his elbows and his shoulders, and then the jumpover from shoulder blade to shoulder blade like a spark leaping a gap. After Montag stole a book from the old lady’s home, the narrator says, “So it was the hand that started it all. According to the narration, Montag felt: “It was a pleasure to burn. He also knew: “that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-forked, in the mirror”(4). He lives life the way the society wants him to, never questioning his work or the world. Montag begins his desperate quest to comprehend the purpose of books after an intense scene with an old woman committing suicide in order to preserve her books. Montag feels his occupation is quite satisfying. His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms.