Captain Beatty is Guy's commanding officer. In the text, he serves as a historian for the reader as well as an apologist for the state. He is the principal antagonist and the epitome of the fire symbol (destruction) within the text. Ultimately he dies from the very flame he cherishes.

Beatty is a contradiction in that he has the air of a well-read man and, at one point, tells Montag that intellectual curiousity is a natural part of being a fireman, indeed that all firemen become attracted to books at some point in their career.

Beatty's compassion for Guy's predicament is short-lived, however, as Beatty sets 'The Mechanical Hound' on his colleague,

More sinister is the suggestion that Beatty may have been responsible for Clarisse's death - 'Queer ones like her...We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early.'