Montag escapes across the river
Montag escapes across the river is the decisive physical and symbolic crossing that completes his metamorphosis from a fireman who burned books into a fugitive who carries them in his memory. After killing Captain Beatty with a flamethrower and watching his own house collapse into red coals and black ash, Montag is a hunted man with a numbed leg from the Hound's needle, four salvaged books in his hands, and nowhere to go but toward the river. The flight is the climax of his week-long unraveling—a week that began with the question "Are you happy?" from Clarisse McClellan and passed through the suicide of an old woman who chose to burn with her books, the theft of a Bible, the reading of "Dover Beach" to weeping women, and the murder of his captain. Now he must outrun not only the Mechanical Hound but the entire city mobilized against him.
The Flight to the River
Montag runs through alleys and across a vast, empty boulevard ten lanes wide, a "boatless river" of concrete under blazing arc-lamps. He is nearly killed by a carful of teenagers who swerve at him for sport—the same kind of children, he wonders, who might have killed Clarisse. He falls flat, and the car misses him by a sixteenth of an inch of black tread on his middle finger. He reaches the riverbank, strips in darkness, and splashes his body with raw liquor to mask his scent, then dresses in the old clothes Professor Faber gave him. He tosses his own clothing into the current and wades out until there is no bottom, letting the river sweep him away.
The River as Sanctuary
Three hundred yards downstream, the Mechanical Hound reaches the river just as helicopter searchlights flood the water. Montag dives under the illumination and feels the river pull him onward into darkness. The lights switch back to land; the helicopters swerve away, having picked up a false trail. For the first time in a dozen years, the stars come out above him "in great processions of wheeling fire." Floating on his back, he experiences a sudden peacefulness, moving from "an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new." The river gives him leisure to think—about the sun that burns every day, about time, about the necessity of saving rather than burning. He realizes that "one of them had to stop burning" and that he must become part of the "guild of the asbestos-weaver."
The Encounter with Granger's Group
Montag steps from the river onto the land, overwhelmed by the million odours of the wilderness—hay, pickle, parsley, mustard, carnations, liquorice. He finds an abandoned railroad track and follows it, certain that Clarisse had once walked here. Ahead, he sees a fire that is not burning but warming, surrounded by five old men in dark blue denim. Their leader, Granger, recognizes him from the televised chase and offers him coffee and a chemical drink to change his perspiration index. The men are former academics—a Cambridge professor, a UCLA specialist, a Columbia ethicist, a defrocked minister—who have become living books, each memorizing a text to preserve it. Granger tells Montag that the police have faked his death by sacrificing an innocent pedestrian to the Hound on television. "Welcome back from the dead," Granger says.
Joining the Book People
Montag confesses he has nothing to offer—he thought he carried part of Ecclesiastes and Revelation but has forgotten it. Granger reassures him: "Nothing's ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you." He explains that the group is a loose network of thousands on the roads and abandoned rail tracks, "bums on the outside, libraries inside." Each person is a dust-jacket for a book; if one dies, another carries the text. Montag learns that the war has begun and the city has been bombed. He remembers, in the concussion, that he met Mildred in Chicago, and the words of Ecclesiastes return to him perfectly. As dawn breaks, the men eat bacon by a new fire, and Granger tells the myth of the Phoenix—the bird that burns itself and is reborn—but insists that humans have one advantage: "We know the damn silly thing we just did." Montag begins walking north with the others, carrying the memory of the tree of life from Revelation, ready to recite it when they reach the city.
