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Characters

• Guy Montag is the protagonist and fireman (see above) whose metamorphosis is illustrated throughout the book and who presents the dystopia through the eyes of a loyal worker to it, a man in conflict about it, and one resolved to be free of it. Through most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes what he hears. Bradbury notes in his afterword that he noticed, after the book was published, that Montag is the name of a paper company.
• Faber is a former English professor who represents those who know what is being done is wrong but are too fearful to act. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell.
• Mildred Montag is Guy Montag's wife, who makes an attempt at suicide early on in the book by overdosing on sleeping pills. She is used symbolically as the opposite of Clarisse McClellan. In the 1966 film, her name was changed to Linda Montag.
• Clarisse McClellan displays every trait Mildred does not, in that she is outgoing, naturally cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She serves as the wake-up call for Montag by posing the question “Why?” to him. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by teachers for (as Captain Beatty puts it) asking why instead of how and focusing on nature rather than on technology. Montag regards her as odd until she goes missing; the book gives no definitive explanation. It is said that Captain Beatty and Mildred know that Clarisse has been killed in a car accident.
• Captain Beatty is Montag's boss and the fire chief. Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books as a result of life's tragedies and of the fact that books contradict and refute each other. Beatty tries to entice Montag back into the book-burning business but is burned to death by Montag when he underestimates Montag's resolve. Montag later realizes that Beatty might have wanted to die, purposely provoking Montag to kill him. In a scene written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves. Beatty is the symbolic opposite of Faber.
• Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents. Where Beatty destroys, he preserves; where Beatty uses fire for the purpose of burning, Granger uses it for the purpose of warming. His acceptance of Montag is considered the final step in Montag's metamorphosis from embracing Beatty's ultimate value of happiness and complacency to embracing Granger's value of the love of knowledge.
• Mechanical Hound The mechanical hound exists in the original book but not in the 1966 film. It is an emotionless, eight-legged killing machine that can be programmed to seek out and destroy free thinkers, hunting them down by scent. It can remember as many as 10,000 scents at a time. The hound is blind to anything but the destruction for which it is programmed. It has a proboscis in a sheath on its snout, which injects lethal amounts of procaine and morphine. Although Montag is able to survive a partial injection into his leg, he suffers severe discomfort and numbness for a short time. The first hound encountered in the novel is destroyed when Montag sets it on fire with a flamethrower. A second hound sent to kill Montag but loses his scent when Montag jumped into a river. The hound then goes and finds a random victim to convince the television audience that the hound never fails (and also to keep the show short enough to keep the attention of the dim-witted masses). Bradbury notes in his afterword that the hound is "my robot clone of A. Conan Doyle's great Baskerville beast", referring to the famous Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles.
• Mildred's friends (Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps) Mildred's friends represent the average citizens in the numbed society portrayed in the novel. They are examples of the people in the society who are unhappy but do not think they are. When they are introduced to literature (Dover Beach), which symbolizes the pain and happiness that has been censored from them, Mrs. Phelps is overwhelmed by the rush of emotion that she has not felt before.