Fahrenheit 451

Total words: 1489

One of the main themes of the novel Fahrenheit 451 is censorship. Censorship is n: the action of a censor esp. in stopping the transmission or publication of matter considered objectionable. That is, of course, according to the guys over at Merriam-Webster.

The theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 can be seen from several different viewpoints. Bradbury's novel primarily gives an anti-censorship message. Bradbury understood censorship to be a natural projection of an extremely tolerant society. The society envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 is often compared to Huxley's Brave New World, according to the researchers at novelguide.com. Though both works certainly have an anti-government theme, that is not the core idea of Bradbury's novel.

More importantly, Fahrenheit 451 has an anti-apathy, anti-dependence, and anti-television message. People in this novel are afraid of themselves. They fear the thought of knowing, which leads them to depend on others to think for them. Since they are not thinking for themselves, they need something to occupy their time. This is where television comes in. Television, in turn, leads to whole host of problems: violence, depression, and even suicide.

In Fahrenheit 451, owning and reading books is illegal. The members of this society focus only on entertainment, immediate gratification, and speeding through life. If books are found by the firemen, the books are burned and their owner is arrested. If the owner refuses to abandon the books, he or she often dies, burning along with them. People with interests outside of technology and entertainment, such as Clarisse, are viewed as strange, and possible threats.

Guy Montag lived in a futuristic American city where it was his job, as a fireman, to burn books. According to sparksnotes.com, "the people in this society did not read books, enjoy nature, spend time by themselves, think independently, or have meaningful conversations. Instead, they drove very fast, watched too much television on wall-size sets, and listened to the radio on "Seashell Radio" sets attached to their ears."

Montag encountered a kind seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan, who opened his eyes to the purposelessness of his life with her innocently clever questions and her odd love of people and nature. As Montag's dissatisfaction with his life increased, he began to search for a solution in a stash of books that he had stolen from his own fires and hidden inside an air-conditioning vent.

When Montag failed to show up for work, his fire chief, Beatty, paid a visit to him. Beatty explained that "it's normal for a fireman to go through a phase of wondering what books have to offer," he also explained how books came to be banned in the first place. Beatty told Montag to take about twenty-four hours to see if his stolen books contained anything meaningful and then to turn them in for incineration. Montag began a lengthy and frantic night of reading.

Overwhelmed by the task of reading, he looked to his wife for help. She, however, preferred to watch television and simply could not understand why he would want to risk everything by reading books. He remembered that he once met a retired English professor named Faber, and he decided that Faber might be able to help him. He visited Faber, who told him that the value of books lies in the complete attentiveness of life they contain. Faber said that Montag did not only need the books. He also needed the leisure to read them and the freedom to act upon their ideas.

Faber agreed to help Montag with his reading, and they also devised a rather risky scheme to overthrow the status quo. Faber would contact a printer who was going to begin reproducing books. In the mean time Montag would plant books in the homes of firemen to disgrace the profession and to destroy the vehicle of censorship. Faber gave him a two-way radio earpiece (the "green bullet") so that he could hear everything that Montag heard and talk to him secretly. Montag went home, and soon after two of his wife's friends arrived in order to watch television together. Their superficiality angered him so much that he took out a book of poetry and read "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold to the women. The women were extremely disturbed by the poem and left to file a complaint, with the fire station, that was aimed against him.

Montag went to the fire station and handed over one of his books to Beatty. Beatty baffled Montag by bombarding him with contradictory quotations from great books. Beatty exploited these inconsistencies to show that literature was morbid and extremely complex, and that it deserved to be incinerated. All the sudden the alarm sounded, they rushed off to answer the call, only to find that the alarm was at Montag's house. When Mildred got into a cab with her suitcase, Montag realized that his own wife had betrayed him.

Beatty forced Montag to burn the house himself. When Montag was done, Beatty placed him under arrest. When Beatty continued to berate Montag, Montag turned the flamethrower on his superior and proceeded to burn him to ashes. The Mechanical Hound, a monstrous machine that Beatty had set to attack Montag, pounced and injected Montag's leg with a hefty dose of anesthetic. Montag managed to destroy the Mechanical Hound; then he walked off the numbness in his leg and escaped with some books that were hidden in his backyard. He hid the books in another fireman's house and called in an alarm, to disgrace the profession, from a pay phone.

Montag went to Faber's house, where he learned that a new Hound had been put on his trail, along with several helicopters and a television crew. Faber told Montag that he was leaving for St. Louis to see a retired printer who may have been able to help them. We never find out if the printer did help them, or if Faber even made it to St. Louis in the first place. Montag gave Faber some money and told him how to remove his scent from the house so the Hound would not enter it. Montag took some of Faber's old clothes and ran off toward the river. The entire city watched as the chase unfolded on TV. Montag, however, managed to escape in the river and changed into Faber's clothes to disguise his scent.

He drifted downstream into the country and followed a set of abandoned railroad tracks. He found a group of rogue intellectuals ("the Book People") along the railroad tracks. "The Book People" were led by a man named Granger, who welcomed him. They were a part of a nationwide network of book lovers who had memorized numerous great works of literature and philosophy. Montag's role was to memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Enemy jets appeared in the sky and completely eradicated the city with bombs. Montag and his new friends moved on to search for survivors and to rebuild civilization.

I believe that characters can be measured according to whether or not they do or do not live up to the idea. We as a society judge people and characters based on whether or not they live up to our expectations.

Fahrenheit 451 does not provide a clear explanation of why books are banned in the future. Instead, it suggests that many reasons could be combined to create this result. These reasons can be broken down into two groups: reasons that lead to a universal lack of interest in reading and reasons that make people aggressively hostile toward books. The novel does not clearly distinguish these two developments. Apparently, they simply support one another.

The first group of reasons involves the popularity of opposing forms of entertainment, such as television and radio. Mostly, Bradbury thinks that the presence of fast cars, loud music, and advertisements produces a lifestyle with an excess of stimulation wherein no one has the time to concentrate. Additionally, the huge mass of published material is too overwhelming to think about. This, in turn, leads to a society that reads condensed books, dime novels, (which were very popular in Bradbury's time) rather than the real thing.

The second group of reasons, those of which make people hostile toward books, involves envy. People do not like to feel inferior to those who have read more than they have. But the novel implies that the most important reason leading to censorship is the opposition of special-interest groups and "minorities" to the things in books that offend them. Bradbury is extremely careful to refrain from referring exclusively to racial minorities. Beatty mentions dog lovers and cat lovers, but that is about as specific as the book is on identifying minorities. The reader can only try to conclude which special-interest groups he actually has in mind.

As the Afterword to Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates, Bradbury is extremely sensitive to any attempts to restrict his free speech. For example, he objects strongly to the letters he has received that suggest that he revise his treatment of female and/or black characters. He sees such interventions as more or less hostile and intolerant. In other words, he sees such interventions as the first step on the road to book burning.

Add a Review for this free essay

Be the first one to review this free Essay

Sticky Note Text....

Welcome! Not a Member? Click here to Join Now!
Log in
Forgot Password?