“But Clarisse’s favorite subject wasn’t herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I’ve really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.” He lifted the two books. “These men have been dead a long time, but I know their words point, one way or another, to Clarisse.” (72)
How is this possible? Men that have written these books hundreds of years ago and somehow they lead all to Clarisse? Montag has recently told Mildred that he has these books hidden in his house, but when he starts to actually read them he thinks that they are all talking about his poor neighbor girl who was said to have gotten run over by a car. Could it just be that he is thinking all of this because he misses her, or thinks that she was more than she really was, or could it just be that he has almost gone “crazy” under all of the pressure or guilt that he has because of these books. Montag is a fireman who keeps all of these books because he thinks that they will be worth something one day, so when this happens to him he starts to actually think why he is a fireman and he starts thinking why his job is to burn books when he thinks that there is something valuable inside of them. Montag has trouble going back to work because he doesn’t think that he is going to be able to burn even more books when, according to him they are ‘valuable’.
Clarisse has now been forgotten by everyone else but Montag. Guy wants to know how they wrote almost ‘about her’ but he can’t suffer anymore guilt of having the books. So, will Guy live his life thinking about Clarisse and how the books relate to her or will he just forget about her, and move on with the rest of his life burning books?
It's not that the books are literally about Clarisse; the essence of her, that thing that made Montag awaken from his brainwashed state, was in the books. Montag recognized that the human need to question, to search, to creatively examine other ideas, was the thing that caused him to be so attracted to Clarisse, and the same thing that stopped him from being able to burn the books any longer.
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