Third-person, limited omniscient; follows Montag’s point of view, often articulating his interior monologues

Point of View
Point of View
Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 from a third-person limited omniscient point of view, which means that an objective narrator has special access to the thoughts and feelings of one character. In this case, the narrator has access to Montag’s thoughts and feelings. By focusing the story through Montag’s perspective, Fahrenheit 451 develops a strong critique of society—both the society represented in the novel and Bradbury’s own contemporary society. The objective point of view allows the reader to understand how Montag’s struggles relate to social problems. An example that shows the link between Montag’s internal struggle and Bradbury’s social critique appears when Montag tries to remember the text of Ecclesiastes on the train, but cannot think because of the loud advertisements for Denham’s Dentifrice:

Trumpets blared.
“Denham’s Dentifrice.”
Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.
“Denham’s Dentrifice.”
They toil not—
“Denham’s—"
Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up.
“Dentifrice!”
The inescapable noise makes it impossible for Montag to think, and no doubt keeps his fellow members of society from thinking as well.
The use of a third-person limited omniscient point of view enables the dramatization of Montag’s transformation over the course of the novel. For example, the opening scene demonstrates that Montag sincerely enjoys burning books: “He wanted above all...to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch.” However, later in the book, when faced with a woman who refuses to leave her house even as the firemen ransack it, Montag experiences a moment of crisis:
A fountain of books sprang down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the sheer stairwell. How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a candle...You weren’t hurting anyone, you were hurting only things!...But now, tonight, someone had slipped. This woman was spoiling the ritual.
The narrator begins and ends the passage with Montag lamenting the inconvenience of the woman’s presence, but a subtle shift in perspective occurs between these laments. Even as he tells himself that he isn’t hurting anyone when he destroys their books, Montag dimly understands that his actions do, in fact, hurt people. If the woman is “spoiling the ritual,” that means she’s exposing the ritual for what it really is: violence. By recounting Montag’s experience so closely, the narrator enables the reader to understand the reasons for Montag’s change of heart.
Tone
Tone
The tone of Fahrenheit 451 is intense and gloomy. The most obviously intense aspect of the novel is the apocalyptic atmosphere that hangs over the city, constantly threatening nuclear war. Equally intense are the totalitarian policies that police Montag’s society. As Montag witnesses repeatedly in the novel, anyone who breaks the law in this future can expect a punishment characterized by extreme force and fiery intensity.
Furthermore, entertainment in Montag’s society always takes intense forms. When people crave a thrill, they simply get in the car and drive a hundred miles per hour, threatening to hit and kill unsuspecting pedestrians. Television programs also feature intense violence, as evidenced by the program Mildred and her friends watch that depicts cartoon clowns ripping each other apart. When the firemen send the Mechanical Hound after Montag, the chase gets broadcast on live television, concluding with the dramatic capture and execution of an innocent lookalike. These and other examples of intensity in the novel emphasize the dystopian nature of Bradbury’s imagined future, and they implicitly urge the reader to contemplate the importance of preventing that future from coming to pass.
Though frequently intense, the tone of Bradbury’s novel occasionally dips into gloom. Gloom appears most obviously in Montag’s moments of despair at the dire state of society. This sense of gloom enters the novel after Montag’s first encounter with Clarisse, when he realizes, in the darkness of his bedroom, that he’s unhappy. Later in the novel, the narrator frequently employs repetitive language to emphasize Montag’s despair at the spiritual hollowness of his peers. For example:
The emptiness made an even emptier whistle, a senseless scream. He tried to think about the vacuum upon which the nothingnesses had performed, but he could not. He held his breath so the vacuum could not get into his lungs. He cut off its terrible emptiness.
In this passage, the narrator’s repeated use of the closely related terms “emptiness,” “vacuum,” and “nothingness” underscores Montag’s feelings of despondency in the face of his dystopian society. Throughout the novel, Montag’s gloom functions in contrast with—and as a negative response to—the sheer, violent intensity of the world around him.