In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury attempts to convey a number of messages, but I feel one of the most prominent and important themes is that humans need to have intellectual freedom and depth in order to truly live and be happy. In "The Hearth and the Salamander" and shortly into "The Sieve and the Sand", the reader is introduced to three types of people: the willfully blind, those with the ability or desire to reform, and those that have already been enlightened.
	Mildred Montag is the first and most prominent example of willfully blind people in this novel: she is shallow, unhappy, and distant from other humans like Guy. She is the stereotypical blinded and pacified American that America itself created and is the product of a lack of intellectual stimulation. Guy at one point in the story asks her "When was the last time you were really bothered about something? Something important?" [TC, you need an in-text citation right here, with the author and page number] and this one question, as well as her refusal to answer, tells the reader how much Mildred really cares about the world. This tells the reader how much she cares about her problems, thinking, storylines, and everything else that is deeper than a depression in dirt made by a shoe.
	Then there are people like Guy Montag, who are also unhappy and largely uneducated but have the potential to change that or are looking for intelligence. Throughout the story, because of his gradual change in personality after meeting McClellan, he is seen as not being happy with his life. However, instead of simply resigning to immediate gratification—as the rest of society does—he asks questions, he thinks, and he attempts to experience nature. This difference between him and the norm is apparent in two places that stick out prominently. In "The Hearth and the Salamander", Guy runs into Clarisse while it is raining and he sees that she is letting the rain fall into her mouth. After they have a brief conversation, which in itself is unusual, he follows suit and tastes the rain like she did (Bradbury 24). While it may not be directly implied, it appears from this that Guy did this because he is a unique individual and that he came away from the situation with a little bit of happiness, a little bit of insight, or even both. The second event that sticks out is at the very end of the book, which shows a stark contrast between how he was in the beginning of the story and his growth to the third type of. Once Guy Montag reaches the river and starts experiencing nature, he almost immediately becomes awestruck by the world he had been missing. He feels calmer, freer, and that he can finally start understanding the world in a new light. "He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great séance and all the murmuring ghosts..." (Bradbury 140). This sort of mentality is often felt by people of the third type at some point in their lives.
	This third group of people is populated by those who have seen what glory, mystery, power, and greatness books can hold. People such as Faber, Beatty, Clarisse and Guy at the end of the story are such people. This group is unique, though, in the fact that Beatty has a twist that is very unlike everyone else in the group. It is implied that when he was younger, he read countless books and was very much in love with them, but his personal life made him resent books. On the latter half of pages 169 and 170, Bradbury reveals a part of what he might have included in the book that pertains to Beatty. It turns out that Beatty was to have tons of books on his property but would never read them [TC, you need a source here]. Bradbury later goes to imply that books no longer had the same effect on him as they used to due to life getting to him, and thus he ends up resenting them. All the same, though, this third group of people is full of people that are similar to those that live in current society, at least in the way that they have managed to have independent, deep, and critical thought. For some, like Beatty, they have yet to achieve happiness, while others, like Clarisse, they have practically achieved the closest thing one could have to nirvana in such a society.
	These three groups of people are used as examples of causes and effects, with each group showing different causes that get progressively more advanced intellectually and thus, each effect is more desirable than the last. No matter how it is worded, the causes and effects of each group can never be defined, but a basic interpretation is this: 1) Happiness is unattainable if people do not expand their intellectual capacity. 2) If a person attempts to expand their intellection capacity, they will either a) give up and revert to cause-effect 1, or b) persevere until finding closure. 3) If a person successfully expands their intellectual capacity and thus achieve higher thinking, they will have a possibility of being happy. In this way, by telling the reader indirectly that shallow people are not happy and that intellectuals can be, Bradbury tells the reader that having freedom of thought and the ability to think in the first place is a positive trait and is a necessity for humanity to thrive and move forward.
[Using “one” in place of “you” is a cheap cop out. Doesn’t look right to me. Also, never use contractions in a formal essay, never use first or second person pronouns, and always put the comma before “and” if you have a series of more than 2. Just good form. Relatively decent paper, though the formatting for the last paragraph is odd. I wouldn’t leave it as a list, though technically I guess you could. Your intro didn’t have a thesis, but I put one in. I suggest mimicking something like it in the conclusion, but you don’t necessarily have to. Depending on your teacher, this should be an A or a B. Also, you should really cite more.]