Knowledge is a weapon far more powerful than anything on this earth. To have knowledge is to have power. Ignorant people believe that knowledge can be destroyed, that it's something that can be forgotten. In the novel Fahrenheit 451, the firemen promote ignorance and abolish knowledge, for fear that knowledge in the people of society would be dangerous. Only, knowledge cannot be destroyed, and knowledge cannot truly be forgotten. Knowledge is the key to human survival and without knowledge, the people of our world would be ignorant, mindless machines.
The world that Montag lives in is that of ignorance. The thoughts of the people living in this world have been completely replaced with those of another person's. Bradbury speaks multiple times of characters or things that seem to be alive and yet somehow dead at the same time. He speaks of Mildred and the Mechanical Hound, as well as the rest of the society in this way; like they are nothing but machines, thinking nothing and doing nothing more than what they were programmed to do. Mindless beings living in a pretend world, created with the intentions of being believed, and due to the lack of knowledge in this society and the promotion of ignorance, it is believed.
Bradbury also uses the idea of nature being disenfranchised with the society in this fake-reality world of Fahrenheit 451. When Montag meets Clarisse -- young, lively, and innocent -- there are many nature symbols. Clarisse shows Montag Truth, and in turn, nature in the novel also shows Montag Truth. In one instance, Montag finds Clarisse dancing through the rain -- head thrown back, mouth open in a smile, letting the rainwater fall delicately onto her tongue. Montag is taken aback; he cannot believe her actions; that she talks so freely of things such as a man on the moon, or the stars, and now, seeing her enjoying nature's rain is making him think that maybe nature is something that can be enjoyed. Montag, having ignored nature his entire life, is now seeing that it is something that is actually beautiful, and untouched by society. He is one of the lucky ones who realizes the nature in his city is not real nature, it is simply manufactured like the rest of society, and he now seeks this truth about the ignorance of his world.
When Montag escapes out of the city as a fugitive, searching for this righteousness, this truth, he encounters a group of people who are like him -- running from the ignorance of society, being considered outlaws for having thoughts that were not placed into the mind by another. These people, in fact, are not people at all; they are books. Plato's Republic, Gulliver's Travels; but then not only books, but authors and scholars -- Charles Darwin, Aristophanes, and Einstein, and there are more of them, all over the country, people who are keeping knowledge alive. They are eating, breathing, sleeping, living knowledge, knowledge that is tucked away into the vault of a person's mind. Amidst it all, there is Montag, the Book of Ecclesiastes. Montag is now not searching for knowledge, but he is a piece of knowledge himself.
"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, we're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run." - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451,(pg. 132). The Firemen in Fahrenheit 451 were so ignorant they believed knowledge could be destroyed, that it was something so abase that it could be forgotten, simply floating around the mind, slipping just out of grasp into the shadows, and then seeping so deeply into the shadows that knowledge is lost; lost, but not destroyed.
Like the men Montag meets and like Montag himself, knowledge is trapped in a mind, and only given up willingly. For most people in Montag's society, knowledge was easily disregarded because people were so ignorant, but for the select few that are able to illuminate the shadows of the mind with the brightness of knowledge were shown a world of remembrance and good. In the end, those of ignorance were lost, and those of knowledge lived, for knowledge is survival.
