Strength in Hardships

Author's Note: This is a response to the writing prompt “'What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.' Nietzsche How would you say that his quote could be applicable to the actions from the most recent part of the novel for Montag? This prompt is referring to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Montag is a fireman in a world where firemen start fires as opposed to our world where they put them out. This world is also one where reading is illegal as are books.

“What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger,” Frederick Nietzsche once said, but is this really true? It seems like that could be true in being that muscles only grow once they have been broken down. Then I think of a heart attack or stroke. Most times those make us weaker and more susceptible to death. Is it that we don’t make ourselves stronger, but those around us? The person receiving the effects of an action, only gets stronger if they choose, to use the effects to make themselves stronger.

By definition stronger means especially able, competent, or powerful in a specific field or respect. It may then be that after a heart attack your mind is the one getting stronger, but does that really matter is you have nobody to share your gift with? Strength can be very concrete as in a weight lifting competition or very biased as in the intelligence of an author.

Through Montag’s hardships he has gotten stronger in both respects. He has had to battle through intentionally burning his own house, to in the same night, being a felon wanted for arson. While running from the police Montag had is leg numbed and his knee shattered by a car going ninety miles an hour, yet he had yet to even think of laying down and turning himself in. His life is at the lowest point that it can ever be, and he made it through alone.

The greatest shows of strength are those that nobody can see. Those that are on the inside. Many want to have glory for their struggles or to have their story told for generations to come. The strongest don’t care about those petty matters they focus on life and what they need to do to prosper.