More Alike Than You'd Think...

 Author's Note- This is my Compare and Contrast essay for Fahrenheit 451.  I decided to compare Montag, the protagonist of the story, to Lev, one of the main characters of Unwind by Neal Shusterman.  I tried to work more on my analyzing skills and syntactical patterns.  Comments are appreciated!

What if everything you knew, everything you've ever believed, turned out to be untrue?  What if one day, you find out that you've been raised on lies?  What if everything you were ever taught, everything you ever did was wrong?  Would you be shocked?  Angry?  Horrified?  These and millions of other emotions coursed through the minds of Levi "Lev" Jedediah Calder and Guy Montag when they came to that mind-blowing realization.  Although you may think that a grown man who's occupation requires him to burn books and a 13-year-old kid who must sacrifice himself "for the church" would have nothing in common, Lev and Montag would be sure to prove you wrong.

In both of these popular and thought-provoking dystopian novels, the characters live in a horrible and barbaric society, but neither recognize how violent and terrible it really is until something or someone comes along and changes their mind.  In the novel Fahrenheit 451, the two main factors that open Montag's eyes to the vulgarity of his world are a teenage girl with stories from the past and an active mind full of dangerous thoughts, and a woman who chooses rather to die with her books than live without them.  In Unwind, the man that Lev has looked up to and had unwavering faith in his entire life tells him to run away from everything he's ever known, rather than willingly let himself be sacrificed, as he's been taught to do since the day he was born.

Another similarity between Lev and Montag is that in both books, they flee from a government trying to catch them.  The government was after Lev because he was scheduled to be unwound as a tithe, and he got away.  The reason they tried to pursue Montag was because he framed and killed two different coworkers, hid books, and overall, just started thinking, instead of mindlessly droning on.

The main commonality that unifies these two characters, though, is that they were both a part of something they thought to be the right thing, when in truth, they were unknowingly committing something terrible.  Montag, for example, was a fireman.  He burned books for a living.  He thought he was doing the people whose books he burned a favor.  He thought he was riding them of terrible, confusing things that deserved to be destroyed.  But after trying reading out for the first time himself, he finds himself drawn into a beautiful, horrible world he never even knew existed.  He discovers the magic of books, and why they're so important.  In Unwind, Lev is a tithe.  His family is a highly devoted Christian family, and they believe that 10% goes to the church.  Their beliefs go so far that they had exactly ten children, and they're going to sacrifice their tenth child to be unwound "for the church".  Lev was raised believing that this was a huge honor.  They threw huge parties for him, praising him, and acting so, unimaginably proud of him.  They showered him in gifts, they told him it was his destiny, and he believed it was the right thing.  It took his Pastor, along with the help of Connor and Risa, to show him how barbaric and disgusting it really was.

Although they have tons of similarities, the two characters also have their differences.  Religion is a huge part of Lev's life.  It’s the reason he was slated to become unwound.  It's the reason he begins to question everything he ever learned.  It's all he grew up with- he and his family worshipped God with all their heart and soul.  Meanwhile, religion seems to be an absent aspect in Montag's life, aside from a few bible quotes mentioned here and there throughout the book.

Another difference that sets the characters apart is their ignorance in the beginning of each novel.  They are both ignorant, but in different ways.  Montag is completely ignorant to how the government is controlling them.  He's unaware of the situation in any town but his own, and even unaware of the tragic mental state his wife is in.  He's ignorant because he doesn't understand life, nor does he want to, until a young girl comes and shows him how to live.  Lev's ignorance is shown more through the way he acts towards others.  In the beginning of the book, he genuinely believes that being a tithe makes him much more important than everyone else- his classmates, his siblings, even some of his teachers.  It gives him a sense of higher being.  He thinks his destiny is greater than theirs.  His ignorance is in the fact that he feels he's better than everyone else and doesn't need to know them to know he's superior.

A key divider between the two characters is their impulses and how they control them.  Lev's character is sort of clever, almost conniving, once placed in life or death situations.  He always thinks before speaking and is always plotting ahead.  He's very careful and calculating.  Meanwhile, Montag often times lets his impulse take control, and seldom has an idea of what the next step is.  He loses his temper easily- a prime example of this would be when he's talking with Mildred and her "friends".  The ones who cart their children of to boarding school and plop them in front of the TV for the three days a month they get back.  He really loses his composure when he reads that poem to them and snaps at that horrid lady.

These two characters are quite different.  One acts on his thoughts immediately, throwing caution to the wind, while one carefully plans everything out.  One's life was greatly influenced by God, while the other was barely introduced to the idea of Christianity.  But both show determination, curiosity, and both lived in a terrible place, but had no idea how violent things really were.  These characters are a lot more similar than you'd think, and each of them are able to transform into better people by the end of their separate novels.