is experiencing first- hand what he has been responsible for doing to others, throughout all the time he has been a fireman—it has now becomeshis turn, as with the old woman, to decide how important having books is to him.

It is in this section that Montag chooses to change his life forever. First, he kills Beatty, showing how far he is willing to go; next he plants books in Black's house and reports his fellow-firefighter for having them; he runs from the Mechanical Hound—"beating" it; and, makes it across the river to join others like him who have chosen to leave society to read, share, memorize, and enjoy the knowledge of books—to build a new place to live.

Granger, one of the men Guy Montag meets on the other side, likens the destruction of their society, as well as their plan to rebuild, to the mythical phoenix:

There was a silly damned bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up...But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing...

The third section of the book, in an odd way, is like Montag's religious conversion (theme: change and transformation). Montag had heard "the Word" before, from people like Clarissa and Faber, but had been slow to move or change. The conversion is a dark one, with the ghastly murder of Beatty, but symbolically this represents rejection of an old way of life to make way for the new. In this story of growing self-awareness and rebellion, Montag becomes a "founding-father" of a new society.

In Fahrenheit 451, most people are completely dependent on technology and cut off from nature. Nobody, for example, walks anywhere anymore, except for those like Clarisse and her family members, who risk being arrested as deviants for such behavior. Similarly, we in our society tend to depend on cars and drive everywhere. Many people in our culture are thus, as in the novel, divorced from the natural world because they do not often encounter it. Part of the epidemic of obesity, for example, has been blamed on children not playing outside the way they used to in earlier generations.

We also tend to be dependent on the various devices that connect us to the virtual world of the internet, just as people like Mildred are dependent on their interactive television shows and interactions with TV characters, such as the White Clown. Many of us would be disoriented and upset if we were suddenly cut off from the internet, just as Mildred is when Montag turns off her television screens.

Montag's society is destroyed by technology: we too face that threat.

There was a book published in 1985, written by Neil Postman titled "Amusing Ourselves to Death."  He describes some of the trade offs between going from a print based culture to one that is in many ways screen based.  Like the people in F-451 who cannot seem to find any meaningful existence outside of their entertainment, he argues that in some ways the massive focus on entertainment has cheapened political discourse and had a number of deletorious effects on modern society.

If you look at Mildred and her inability to find any satisfaction in real life and her total absorption in the screens and her desire to have one more so she has the whole wall you can see a representation of this possibility, something that Bradbury certainly had in mind as he watched the proliferation of TV for the first time.

Bradbury addresses numerous issues in modern American society throughout his novel Fahrenheit 451 that readers can relate to today. The prominence of media throughout Bradbury's dystopian society directly relates to America's addiction to television, the internet, movies, video games, and social media. The massive parlor walls also correlate with the increasing size of television screens and displays on cell phones. Bradbury addresses the lack of literature in society, which is something America's multimedia culture detracts from and citizens continue to neglect.

Bradbury also addresses the abuse of prescription medications in the scene where Mildred overdoses on sleeping pills. In modern American society, abusing prescription drugs is a serious issue. Readers can also relate to Faber's rant regarding the consumer culture and making Christ a commodity during the holidays. Bradbury also addresses concerns about being in a constant state of war, which directly relates to America's ongoing presence in Afghanistan and the War on Terror. Bradbury's ability to address and predict certain issues in society that are still prevalent is one of the main reasons Fahrenheit 451 is still popular to this day. 

Consider some different areas that might be similar.  For example, Clarisse explains that many of the kids her age "all say the same things and nobody says antyhing different from anyone else".  Are kids you see every day afraid to stick out and be different?  Are they all talking about the same things over and over?  Also, Clarisse mentions how she is "afraid of kids my own age" because they are so cruel to each other.  In her society, they kill each other; but are there examples of how kids are cruel to each other on a smaller scale that you could relate to?

Other areas of possible connection could be how much people watch t.v. these days; all Mildred does all day long is watch her t.v. walls.  So many of us are glued to the t.v. screen, the movie theater or the computer.  Also think about books.  In Montag's society books are forbidden, but they got to be that way because people stopped reading them because they were too lazy.  How many of your friends read books very often?  When is the last time you sat down and really discussed a book with your friends?  So that could be another similarity.

If you look close at your life, and to examples from the book, you should be able to see many similarties; Bradbury fashioned his dystopian novel after our society itself, and just made it the worse-case scenario.  There are connections all throughout the book that hopefully relate to your life.