What is one example of a motif in Fahrenheit 451?

Ray Bradbury’s 1953 sci fi novel, Fahrenheit 451, is chock full of highly prophetic themes. To help his readers really feel and contemplate his messages, Bradbury makes vivid use of motifs throughout the novel, which are images, objects, ideas, or phrases that occur regularly throughout the story to support and build on the themes. Perhaps the most pervasive motif throughout the novel is Bradbury’s recurring use of nature imagery to highlight the theme of artificiality.

Physically, the characters live in a completely urban, artificial world with cement under their feet, T.V. walls all around them, and theme parks filled with violent activities instead of nature. Emotionally, the effect on individuals is cold and isolating from nature and from each other. To compensate, they have named many of the objects in their lives after things in nature, creating an artificial sense of the natural world. For example, although Montag’s job is to destroy the homes of people who own books, he imagines that the fire looks like a “swarm of fireflies.” Also, the tiny radios that citizens constantly wear in their ears are called "Seashells," yet rather than being at the ocean communing with nature or sharing time with family, they are cutting themselves off from real human interaction to listen to their music and programs. Mildred doesn’t even take hers out at night, and Montag has a hard time getting her to talk to him because she is always tuned in to her Seashells. Using nature terminology to describe unnatural objects and behaviors serves to heighten our understanding of the artificial way of life Bradbury is warning us about.

More often, this nature motif is portrayed through animal imagery, which surfaces regularly throughout the novel. The story of a beautiful, mythological bird, the phoenix, appears several times, suggesting that humans must recreate ourselves time and again after self-destruction. Bradbury describes the burning pages of the books as “pigeon-winged,” portraying how this society is killing all that is natural. They call their cars “beetles” and their firetrucks “salamanders,” furthering the illusion of nature around them. Even the scarier things in life are given natural names. Montag refers to the stomach pump which is used to save his wife from her drug overdose as a “black cobra” with an eye that can peer down into Mildred’s emptiness. Even the death machine that hunts down and eliminates citizens who harbor books is given an animal name—“the Mechanical Hound.” It sleeps and moves and even growls like a dog. But we never hear of any actual pets in the novel (other than the poor critters the firemen set loose for their own entertainment as they watch the Hound practice killing). Although the characters use animal and nature words in their everyday language, there is no resulting warmth or connection to their world or each other, because they still live in an artificial manner.

Aside from a brief meeting with a girl who values nature, it is not until Montag escapes the empty urban existence, leaving the Hound and the helicopters and the cameras behind, that true nature imagery enters the novel. The cocooning river floats him to the safety of the countryside, while the stars overhead remind him of the power and importance of the natural world. “The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider” what really matters in life.