Here you go, the answer I should have written for the prompt I gave my AP Lit students this week.

Maybe.

AP English Literature and Composition 2023 Free Response Question #3:

Many works of literature feature a rebel character who changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs in the text. They may break social norms, challenge long-held values, subvert expectations, or participate in other forms of resistance. The character’s motivation for this rebellious behavior is often complex. 

Either from your reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a character changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the complex motivation of the rebel contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

How does one become a rebel?

It seems like a simple question, but I don’t think it is. There is one obvious way that one could become a rebel: one could be made into a rebel by the sudden appearance or dominance of an authority that takes away the freedom or the lifestyle that one was familiar and comfortable with; if another country invaded this one and overthrew my government and imposed Draconian laws on me, I would rebel against that invader. But first, that seems uncommon; though there have certainly been such invasions and takeovers in the past, they are not the norm; and second, “rebel” implies that there is an established authority, an accepted norm, which the rebel then fights back against — if there is an invasion and a conqueror, then really one who fought that would be a freedom fighter, not a rebel. The invading conqueror would call you a rebel, sure, but only because they want to pretend their power grab was legitimate; and that’s just propaganda.

If you are not conquered by an outside force, then either you were born a rebel, and had to grow up under the established authority, which would make it hard to stay rebellious as they would pressure you, all the time, from all sides, to conform to what is accepted; or the oppressive regime had to grow slowly, over time, getting worse and worse — and then the question becomes, what would be the final straw? What would push you, at the last, from grumbling about the government, to fighting back against the government? Sometimes there may be a sudden shift, a surprise attack that would move the needle well beyond what was acceptable all of a sudden; but I think most authority doesn’t work that way — and surely social conventions do not. The American Revolution was motivated by a long serious of usurpations and abuses, according to the Declaration of Independence; though the American Civil War kicked off after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, there were a hundred smaller elements of the conflict before that. So why was one of the earlier actions of the authority not the one that set off the rebellion? Why was it not a later one? What makes the last straw the last straw?

Those, I think, are not easy questions to answer. But I surely would like to know, not least because I am an authority figure in a classroom full of naturally rebellious people; and not least because I live in a country that at times seems to be sliding slowly into tyranny, one which I will not accept — but where will I draw the line? What is the right place to draw the line?

In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the protagonist Guy Montag becomes a rebel. But he does not start that way. In fact, Montag lives his entire life, until 30 years of age, not only accepting the norms and authorities that control him, but actively participating, encouraging, defending those norms and that authority: Montag is a fireman in a society where firemen, formerly rescuers, are now tasked with eliminating the possibility of rebellion, by destroying free thought and free thinkers. In the novel, the society — an American society set some number of centuries in the future — uses the particular oppressive mechanism of ignorance: they have banned, and now routinely destroy, all books. Montag burns books. It is the first thing that happens in the story, and even more, we immediately know that Montag loves it: the first line of the book is “It was a pleasure to burn.” Even later, when he has changed and is working against the oppressive society that raised him, he still loves burning, he still loves destruction; he still turns to it as a solution to his problems, even though he knows it doesn’t work. But old habits die hard: and that’s my point about rebellion. If a rebel, like Montag, grew up in the oppressive regime, how would they maintain their will to fight back, for their whole lives? Montag has the seed of rebellion in him even before the events of the book bring it to fruition: he steals books that he is supposed to burn, and keeps them; he has been doing this for a year before the novel’s plot begins, and has twenty or so illicit books inside his house. He also fails to report a book reader he meets in a park, simply keeping his name and address in his own personal files, even though in the encounter he knew the old man had a book of poetry in his pocket. So even before the book starts, Montag is not entirely conformist, not completely comfortable with who he is and the world that has made him this way: but he does not at first rebel against it. He does end up subverting expectations, by turning on the very society he helps prop up; but before that, he had to conform to the expectations before he could subvert them. And which act is more significant? If I spend ten years kicking your ankles, and then one day get you an ice pack for your bruises — and I now the good guy? Is Montag?

Clarisse, on the other hand, has always been a rebel: we are told that this young woman, Montag’s neighbor, has always been different, has never fit in. And we can see the cost of that: she is being watched carefully, along with her whole family, by the government, Fire Captain Beatty reveals to us; Clarisse tells us that she has been often kept out of school and has to report to a psychiatrist to make her act “right.” She says that she doesn’t really have any friends among her peers, because children her age scare her: bereft of the empathy and broader perspective that reading books can provide, along with the other results of living under an oppressive tyranny, the young people in this world are savage and violent, killing people for fun. Clarisse is different, and her difference has an effect on Montag: when she speaks to him, in a way that is not any longer an accepted and conventional way of speaking to people, she inspires in him a curiosity that drives him to try to learn things he didn’t know before. This is certainly part of what makes Montag a rebel: but it is also probably part of what kills Clarisse, who vanishes early on in the book, never to return; we are told she was killed in a car accident, which is probable, considering how the people act and how they drive; but also, maybe the government removed a threat to their control over the people. 

So why isn’t that done to Montag? 

It makes sense that he would be driven to fight back once he realizes that Clarisse had shown him how terrible his world is; but why does he realize that? He responds more honestly and openly to Clarisse when she starts speaking to him; she comments on it. But wouldn’t that imply he was willing to speak to the “crazy” people like Clarisse before, and just never got caught at it? Why didn’t he get caught? Captain Beatty knows right away that Montag has been speaking to Clarisse. It’s one of the great things about this novel: the ruling power structure is not stupid, and are more than capable of discovering and eliminating threats to their hold on power. 1984 makes the same point, even more effectively, because in that book, Big Brother wins — which raises the question of just how rebellious is Winston Smith?

How rebellious is Montag? Are you rebellious if you fail?

Clarisse was rebellious in following her passions and her curiosity, exploring her world, speaking to people as she wanted to, rejecting the mind numbing activities and schooling that keeps all of her peers asleep in their own lives; in all of that, she rebels, and is successful at it. But she never even thinks about attacking the power structure: she just wants to stay alive. That makes sense to me. Faber, too, the old man in the park with a poetry book whom Montag did not turn in, is somewhat rebellious in mind and heart: he has considered ways that the power structure could be fought, mostly eliminating impossibilities — which shows how existing effective power structures become incredibly adept at preventing rebellion — but keeping a couple of tricks up his sleeve; when Montag comes to him looking for help and advice, Faber is able to give Montag at least a little bit. But he doesn’t actually help. He advises Montag against taking action. He refuses to do anything more than talk to Montag while Montag takes all the risks. I don’t know how rebellious that is, though Faber is rebel-adjacent, at least. 

But that only occurs because Montag refused, on a whim, to turn Faber in when he should have, and now Montag has a desire to rebel — and no idea how he should actually do it.

So what pushed Montag to rebellion?

He mentions a few experiences: Clarisse’s death, after her friendship with Montag, is certainly one. Another is that Mildred, his wife of ten years, overdoses on pills right at the beginning of the book; the clear depiction of this in the novel is that overdoses like hers are incredibly common — the hospital doesn’t admit her, instead sending technicians to her home to pump her stomach and filter her blood, and when Montag asks why there isn’t a doctor there to help her, they laugh and say that’s not necessary, all they need is the machines and two plumbers. And they do treat her like a broken toilet, for whom they don’t care one way or another: because Mildred is nothing special, just like all the other people who live or die in this world. So Montag recognizes the heartlessness of his society, separate from Clarisse’s example. But also, when the firemen talk about how they use the Mechanical Hound, a robot who tracks fugitives by smell and kills them with a massive overdose of opiates, to alleviate boredom by setting it to kill one of a small group of animals released in a closed space, betting on which one will get caught and killed, Montag mentions how he stopped participating in that practice some time ago. So did he have empathy before? How? If it was strong enough to affect him, how did he not get caught showing unseemly feelings for his fellow men, or even just for the cats the firemen set the Mechanical Hound to kill?

Did he hide his non-conforming attitudes and behaviors? How? He’s not really an actor: when he does try to pretend that everything is fine, he is in a constant state of near-panic, and Captain Beatty always knows it — though Beatty doesn’t always comment on it. Beatty knows how to keep secrets.

Want to know one secret Beatty kept? He has read books. Lots of books. The clear implication is that Beatty was once a reader and lover of reading, but then was convinced to join the forces of darkness and oppression, and he does it, gladly and whole-heartedly. It’s another question which could (and should) be explored: why do rebels sometimes stop rebelling, and swing all the other way to become enforcers of the status quo? 

One more influence that seems to help drive Montag to rebellion is the woman on Elm St. — my personal hero in this book — who, when the firemen show up at her house to burn her books, and threaten to burn her, beats them to the punch, setting her own house and her own self ablaze. Montag is strongly affected by it, which again shows that he may be different, that he may care more when people die horribly; but the other firemen are silent, as well, as they drive away. So they seem to be affected by this, just like Montag. So why does he resist, and the others do not? 

To return to the main question, then: what drives Montag to rebel? Because he does, finally, rebel: he reads the books he stole, and then when Mildred brings her vacuous friends over to watch TV with her, he reads a poem from a book at them — Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” about the slow loss of faith in the world and the terrible emptiness that remains when all hope and goodness are lost. And maybe that poem represents why Montag fights back against his society; but also, in the poem, Arnold doesn’t fight against the loss of faith, he simply asks for true love to protect himself and his new wife from the terrible darkness and the dangers all around them. Like Faber, he accepts the loss of a good world, and tries to survive if he can. Not so Montag, who then goes on to fight more openly and aggressively: when Beatty tries to arrest Montag, knowing that he has stolen a book and read it (Montag is reported for the Dover Beach incident, though that’s not the only way Beatty knows about Montag’s defiance of their norms), Montag instead murders Beatty, assaults two other firemen, destroys the Mechanical Hound, and goes on the run. On the way out of town, he also stops and plants his own ill-gotten books in the home of another fireman, calling in the alarm himself so that the fireman will lose his home and suffer suspicion that he won’t deserve. Is that rebellion? In a way, certainly, because he’s breaking the rules and harming an enforcer of the tyrannical government; but also, that fireman is no more guilty of oppressing society than is Montag himself. 

Is it rebellious if you remove yourself as an enforcer of norms and conventions? If you simply refuse to participate in making other people toe the line, are you a rebel? Doesn’t feel like enough. Imagine if George Washington had just — not collected the Stamp Tax. So if pulling himself out of the ranks of enforcers isn’t enough to make Montag really a rebel, then why would it be enough to ruin one other guy’s life? Just one more drone removed from the ranks; what is the point of that? There are always more drones.

Then again: if Clarisse was the catalyst for Montag’s rebellion, then maybe losing their home to an unfair raid by the firemen would be enough to change the views of Mr. and Mrs. Black.

In the end, it is not really clear why Montag rebels. He doesn’t plan it out, he doesn’t think about it; he just does it — and he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why while he is actually doing it, in most cases. When he steals a book from the home of the woman on Elm St., he watches his hands tuck the book inside his jacket, and he describes them as someone else’s hands, not his, nothing to do with him; clearly that isn’t true, but it shows his understanding of his actions at the time — or rather, his almost total lack of understanding. He wonders, repeatedly, why Clarisse affected him so much; he also asks where she came from, how someone like her could exist. And we don’t know. Her family is different: but why are they allowed to exist? We know why Faber exists and lives in this society that is everything he hates: he is a coward, self-professed, and cannot bear the thought of fighting; even when he joins Montag, Faber actually does nothing active or practical to fight against the government that has taken everything away from him, over the course of decades. He helps a rebel, but he isn’t one. 

This is the final message of Bradbury’s book, and of his characterization of Montag as the protagonist and main rebel against this dystopian regime: Montag doesn’t have any special reason to rebel. Montag is not in any way special. He’s just a guy. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly brave, he doesn’t really have any insights; within his circumstances, the things that happen to him are not that extraordinary. But for some reason, they affect Montag just a little bit differently, just a little bit more, than they might affect another person — and so everything changes.

That’s the point. Regimes like this dystopian nightmare are doomed: because nobody can predict what would make someone rebel. The totalitarian tyranny would naturally seek to eliminate all questions, all threats, all non-conformity; and they would probably do so very effectively. But it doesn’t take much to make someone take action. Sometimes, all it takes is one friend: gaining one friend, and losing one friend. Sometimes all it takes is realizing the answer to one simple question: Are you happy? Montag realizes he is not: and that’s what makes him fight to change his world. 

But Bradbury’s book, unlike the film versions that have been made based on it, is also not that hopeful: because in the end of Bradbury’s novel, the result of Montag’s rebellion is — nothing. He has no impact whatsoever. The tyrannical government collapses on itself through its own actions, not because Montag saved the day. So while the government’s attempt to prevent rebels like Montag from existing is hopeless, because the motivation, the driving force behind those rebels is mysterious and will always remain so; the rebellion of people like Montag is equally hopeless: because while the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane on the other side of the world, it can’t save human society. 

Because it can’t make people want to read books. 

However: that isn’t the end of this. Because Bradbury’s book is not just about people reading books, nor is it simply about a dystopian world with a totalitarian state; it is not only about Montag and his futile (though well-meaning and justified) rebellion. After Montag kills and escapes the servants of the state, he returns to Faber: who takes action and helps Montag to escape. And then Faber takes further action, leaving the city to seek out a printer he knew, so they can begin printing books once again — unquestionably rebellious, and also a more effective form of rebellion than Montag’s plan of planting book in all the firemen’s houses. Faber also tells Montag to leave the city and seek out a group of people who live on the outskirts of civilization, which Montag does: and those people, former professors and scholars and readers, and still current thinkers, show Montag (and us) the hope Bradbury sees even in his dystopian vision. It is learning. Granger, the leader of this group, describes for Montag how humanity seems to always destroy itself, and then rebuild itself out of the ashes — but the difference is that humanity learns from its mistakes. We recognize the damn stupid thing we just did, he says, and we learn not to make the same mistake. Sure, we go ahead and make a new mistake, and destroy ourselves again — but we don’t do it the same way twice. Which means, eventually, we may learn not to destroy ourselves any more.

That’s the hope. And it runs throughout this novel: because the point of this is that change, and improvement, are slow and incremental. Exactly as I described the slow degradation into tyranny and the slow rise of rebelliousness at the outset of this essay. Things don’t tend to happen quickly in our society: but they do happen. Montag doesn’t overthrow the government — but he tries. He changes. He changes because Clarisse talked to him, asked him a question, treated him as a friend; little things, but they were enough to influence Montag. Montag changed Faber, not much, but a little, just as Faber was changing Montag, giving him direction, giving him support. Granger changed Montag, and is changed by him in return: because at the very end of the book, Granger lets Montag take the lead, stepping aside for him. Just as they are walking: but for a small change, it is symbolic.

Like Montag’s rebellion. It comes in small steps, comparatively, and it has small impacts: but so does everything we do. And as this book shows, just the right small impacts in just the right places at just the right times — it can set the world on fire.

Or put it out.