Arguably, Granger is another hero of Fahrenheit 451. Montag meets Granger in Part Three after he has fled the city. He is the leader of an underground group, composed mainly of former college professors, who have memorised books to prevent the total loss of knowledge. Granger tasks Montag with memorising the Book of Ecclesiastes and thus gives him a sense of purpose in the resistance movement.
For Granger, society is like the Phoenix: a "silly damn bird" which burned itself in a funeral pyre ever few hundred years. Society has made some great mistakes, notably in permitting the destruction of books, and Granger envisions a society in which this mistake is rectified:
Someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them.
His ability to stay hopeful in this climate of fear and censorship makes Granger the most optimistic and heroic of all the characters in Fahrenheit 451. He knows that this task is not easy and that society cannot be rebuilt overnight:
We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation…Someday the load we're carrying with us may help someone.
His determination, however, is rewarded with the closing of the book. The city is destroyed, leaving Granger and his men to oversee its rebuilding and to pass on the stories they have memorised.
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