What Can You Find Behind the Story?

"Books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're nonfiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost." (62) Beatty is trying to put ideas into Montags head that he may not believe. Montag has not read a book and he doesn't know if Beatty is being truthful to him. Bradbury is trying to convey the thought that people think there are more important things to life than reading. Books put you into a world of unreal ideas and things that the writers want you to believe, but are not true. He said it would be better if people got out and run around and have fun. Montag doesn't believe this is true and is desperate to read the books he has hidden from his wife all along.

In this novel, people fear books, they are afraid that it will change them--the way they act, the way they think. Montag is seeing the other side of the fear he used to be in. He sees something brighter and deeper that may be living in books. "...for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." (page 51-52)

The man behind each book is important because they put their time and effort to use their imagination to create, after all, a not so horrible story. Stories cleanse us and make us see things differently than others. It makes you think of what the writer actually means behind the text itself rather than just reading the book and understanding the story. Books do say something, but you just have to dig deep to find it.