Fahrenheit 451 Literary Analysis “ The real problem is not whether if machines think, but if men do,” are the words of a wise man named B.F. Skinner. Many depend on technology to solve their problems and not themselves. In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Guy Montag goes through a series of events that changes his life forever. He lives in a strict, dependent, and grayed society. There is one major law that everyone must follow or they will suffer serious consequences such as the burning of their house. You are not allowed to have any books. In this story Montag struggles to see the reality of his own society, but has to dodge obstacles to do so. With the help of forbidden objects,books, he realizes what has become of his …show more content…
While walking home she asks him a gamut of question about his job and why he does it. Montag responds with brief answers as if he does not want to be bothered or as if he’s unsure of the answer. He’s also nervously laughing because he has a feeling that he hasn’t really felt before. He wouldn’t really know what he was feeling since he does not read any books about it. Also the people surrounding Montag are emotionless. So he does not experience much other emotions other than happiness, sadness, or madness. After more conversations with Clarisse, his eyes start to widen a little. He starts to become interested in why the government would ban books. He starts to wonder of what the book …show more content…
He then reads them at night while his wife, Mildred, is asleep. Have you ever heard the saying Curiosity killed the cat? Well that is what happened to Montag when his wife has woken up out her sleep to check on Montag. She had caught him reading books and was in complete shock. He then explains himself on the reason why he’s doing it and talks Mildred into not setting off the alarm. When Montag read to Mildred, neither he or Mildred understood what the text was saying. Since books have been taken away, people do not have the correct education to comprehend the work of literature. They have little to no comprehension skills. The schooling system does not use books either. So the students do not learn much, especially since their teacher is on a screen and they are given answers instead of asked for them. They do not get much interaction with the teacher or other children if the ever needed help either. As a child, you would usually have happy memories with family and friends, but being a child in Montag’s town was like being a remote controlled robot. All the children do is go to school for several hours, play a required sport after, then go home. At the end of the second part, there was a hound scratching on Montag’s door, but he did not take it as a warning. He should be cautious because the mechanical hounds were designed to search for books. Montag had books in his
Books are outlawed and burned. People are being taken away for owning them. The government has made these laws. THis is the society that Montag lives in. He has figured it out and wants to fix his society, but first he has to eliminate the biggest problem. That problem is the government control.
There are two different types of people in the world, those who follow the rules and those who do not. In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes about a futuristic time period where people no longer read books. Not only do they not read anymore but it is illegal. In this town the government controls what their people learn, and how they must think. In Ray Bradbury 's novel, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury creates the stereotypical character, Mildred who does not think for herself versus Clarisse, a character who is not afraid to question things and who constantly challenges society.
In Federalist 10 James Madison argued that while factions are inevitable, they might have interests adverse to the rights of other citizens. Madison’s solution was the implementation of a Democratic form of government. He felt that majority rule would not eliminate factions, but it would not allow them to be as powerful as they were. With majority rule this would force all parties affiliate and all social classes from the rich white to the poor minorities to work together and for everyone’s opinion and views to be heard.
When a community attempts to promote social order by ridding society of controversial ideas and making every citizen equal to every other, the community becomes dystopian. Although dystopian societies intend to improve life, the manipulation of thoughts and actions, even when it is done out of the interest of citizens, often leads to the dehumanization of people. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Montag, the main character, lives in a dystopian society that has been so overly simplified and homogenized, in order to promote social order, that the citizens exist as thoughtless beings. The lack of individual thinking, deficit of depth and knowledge, and the loss of true living is what has transformed Montag’s city into a dystopia and made the
... ideas in books and understand them. Before this Montag never questioned the way he lives, he was blinded by all the distractions. The role that Clarisse plays in the book enables Montag to break free of the ignorance.
As Montag was reading the books he say’s “There must be something in books, something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house;....”(48). In the beginning Bradbury writes about how Montag just thought the the reason the people acted like that, because they were crazy but now he’s seeing there must be something powerful and meaningful in books. This incident also had Montag rethink his lifestyle, because he told his wife “... maybe I wait my job awhile?”(48). That was unexpected because at first he didn't see anything but his job. Bradbury added that the lady in the house made Montag confounded. Montag commented “well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life, God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind all night. I’m crazy with trying.”(48). This was unexpected because he’s seen fires all the time but somehow this one has traumatized him. Also when the woman in the burning house protected about them having her books, he was thinking like what’s making her stay in this house with some unmeaningful books. “You can’t have my books,” she said.”(35). After that night Montag was fed up, with everything because of that one woman persistence to stay in that house with
The theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 can be viewed from several different angles. First and foremost, Bradbury's novel gives an anti-censorship message. Bradbury understood censorship to be a natural outcropping of an overly tolerant society. Once one group objects to something someone has written, that book is modified and censorship begins. Soon, another minority group objects to something else in the book, and it is again edited until eventually the book is banned altogether. In Bradbury's novel, society has evolved to such an extreme that all literature is illegal to possess. No longer can books be read, not only because they might offend someone, but because books raise questions that often lead to revolutions and even anarchy. The intellectual thinking that arises from reading books can often be dangerous, and the government doesn't want to put up with this danger. Yet this philosophy, according to Bradbury, completely ignores the benefits of knowledge. Yes, knowledge can cause disharmony, but in many ways, knowledge of the past, which is recorded in books, can prevent man from making similar mistakes in the present and future.
Everyone has the ability to look at where the world is today and picture what the future might hold. That’s exactly what Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury did in their futuristic novels, though exaggerating quite a bit. In Huxley’s novel Brave New World, he depicts a society where people are decanted from bottles instead of being born from mothers. George Orwell gives us a glimpse at a world where everything is regulated, even sex, in his novel 1984. Bradbury foresaw the future in the most accurate way in his novel Fahrenheit 451; writing about a future without literature to guard the people from negative feelings, just as our college campuses in America are doing by adding trigger warnings to books with possible offensive content.
People nowadays have lost interest in books because they see it as a waste of time and useless effort, and they are losing their critical thinking, understanding of things around them, and knowledge. Brown says that Bradbury suggests that a world without books is a world without imagination and its ability to find happiness. The people in Fahrenheit 451 are afraid to read books because of the emotions that they will receive by reading them and claim them as dangerous. Bradbury hopes to reinstate the importance of books to the people so that they can regain their “vital organ of thinking.” In Fahrenheit 451, Montag steals a book when his hands act of their own accord in the burning house, regaining his ability to read and think on his own (Bradbury 34-35; Brown 2-4; Lee 3; Patai 1, 3).
One of the main reasons that Montag changed so drastically over the course of the book was his curiosity. Montag spent a lot of time thinking about his job and started questioning everything he was doing. He starts wondering why books need to be burned and why things are the way that they are. Montag takes up a special interest in book and why things are this way. “Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work?” Montag asks Beatty showing his curiosity. Montag’s curiosity is what drives him to find out everything he can about books, society and the way that things used to be. It is only natural for him to begin to question everything especially because his job involves burning hundreds of books a day yet he was never told why these books need to burned. Imagine destroying an object everyday, and being told how important your job is. Naturally you would want to know why you are destroying these objects. This is what happened to Montag and Beatty tried to explain it to him and tells him he shouldn’t be too curious about it “A natural error, curiosity alone,” Beatty also asks Montag “Listen to me, Montag. Once to each fireman, at least once in his career, he just itches to know what these books are all about. He just aches to know. Isn't that so?” Curiosity is a very natural emotion and even Beatty, who tries to explain things to Montag and discourages books, even admits to looking a few books but says “I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing!” I believe that this would make Montag even more curious.
The North Korean government is known as authoritarian socialist; one-man dictatorship. North Korea could be considered a start of a dystopia. Dystopia is a community or society where people are unhappy and usually not treated fairly. This relates how Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 shows the readers how a lost of connections with people and think for themselves can lead to a corrupt and violent society known as a dystopia.
Are you really happy? Or are you sad about something? Sad about life or money, or your job? Any of these things you can be sad of. Most likely you feel discontentment a few times a day and you still call yourself happy. These are the questions that Guy Montag asks himself in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book people are thinking they are happy with their lives. This is only because life is going so fast that they think they are but really there is things to be sad about. Montag has finally met Clarisse, the one person in his society that stops to smell the roses still. She is the one that gets him thinking about how his life really is sad and he was just moving too fast to see it. He realizes that he is sad about pretty much everything in his life and that the government tries to trick the people by listening to the parlor and the seashells. This is just to distract people from actual emotions. People are always in a hurry. They have 200 foot billboards for people driving because they are driving so fast that they need more time to see the advertisement. Now I am going to show you who are happy and not happy in the book and how our society today is also unhappy.
As Montag is getting ready for bed, he begins to evaluate his own happiness and there is a great deal of symbolism in his thoughts. He moves about his room as normal but refers to his room as feeling dark and cold with no relief for the sadness he is feeling as though the only happiness he has is when he sees and feels the warm from burning books. “The room felt cold… he could not breathe…. he did not wish to open the drapes or French doors…he did not want the moon to come into the room” (28). As Clarise and Montag have more conversations throughout the story, he realizes that she is not afraid to acknowledge the world around her which intrigues him. He begins to become open minded and become curious as to why laws to censor literature is a law to begin
When Montag meets Clarisse, his neighbor, he starts to notice that there is more to life than burning books. Montag states, “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I have used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of those books” (Bradbury 49). It begins to bother Montag that all he has done for the past years is burn books. He starts to rethink his whole life, and how he has been living it. Montag goes on to say, “It took some men a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! It is all over” (Bradbury 49) Before, Montag never cares about what he has been doing to the books, but when he begins to ignore the distractions and really think about life he starts to notice that he has been destroying some other mans work. Montag begins to think more of the world
Guy Montag, a fireman in a technologically oriented society, goes against the government to find true happiness. Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, takes place in a dystopian society in a futuristic America where firemen do not put out fires, but rather use fire to eradicate books. This society lavishes ignorance and looks down upon intelligence. The inappropriate use of leisure time in Montag 's world is the biggest contributor to their deficient society, because people no longer have complex personalities, good socializing, parenting, or critical thinking skills.