Fahrenheit 451: Chekov's Gun

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that throughout the entire course of Fahrenheit 451 there's a war going on. It's mentioned pretty scarcely throughout the novel and the reader is led to believe that it's just there for a back story and not much if anything is going to happen off of it or if it's going to be build off of. Then, BAM the book ends in a shower off atomic bombs and the apocalypse is upon us. That's one of the qualities I really enjoyed about this book, the textbook perfect execution of Chekov's gun. Chekov's gun is a rule in plays that if a gun is on stage during the first act then it must at some time in the play go off. It's always a very inconspicuous dropping in of what will happen later in the book and then without warning the event occurs and it's usually incredibly important and alters the plot or one of the characters. It's one of my favorite literary devices and seeing it executed so well is really an enjoyable aspect of reading the novel. That's the brilliant thing about the execution of Chekov's gun is how the reader is fooled into thinking it's an insignificant aspect of the novel or film that will have no consequence for the rest of the novel but often times it is one of the most important happening in the story. At first I didn't think much of the war and I didn't expect that the book would end with the complete destruction of the city, but Bradbury very masterfully pulled it off and I was more than satisfied with the way that he ended such an excellent book. I cannot think of a better way that he could have ended the book using the war. Having killed Montag would have been a bad move in my opinion because after seeing such development out of him would have made the reader feel cheated as if they had just wasted all of their time reading the novel, but he could have ended it differently while retaining the use of the war as the main instrument of ending the book.