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Social norms and their negative effects
Stylistic Features Of Ray Bradbury
Social norms and their negative effects
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If one doesn’t know that they’re sad, they’re always happy. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, is set in a future where books are banned and conformity is pressured. Firemen burn books, and information is censored. Without an ability to question, one cannot question their own happiness. With censorship, anything that can cause you to is removed, and this effect is increased. With reliance on technology, one is so immersed that it becomes almost impossible to question anything, let alone think for oneself, and they can be made to think that they are happy, when in reality, they aren’t. Because the government in Fahrenheit 451 removed the ability to question, censors books and ideas, and creates a reliance on technology, the people in Fahrenheit 451 have deceived themselves into believing they are happy and content.
Because the Government removed the ability to question, the people in Fahrenheit 451 have deceived themselves into believing that they are happy. Guy Montag had been harbouring books for quite a long time, but only recently made it known to his wife. She had friends over, and he took out a poem book and read from it, in front of his wife’s dumbfounded friends. “Then he began to read...Mrs. Phelps was crying. The others...watched her crying grow very loud as her face squeezed itself out of shape....She sobbed uncontrollably... "Sh, sh," said Mildred. "You're all right, Clara,... Clara, what's wrong?" "I-I,", sobbed Mrs. Phelps, "don't know, don't know, I just don't know, oh oh...””. The poem book caused Mrs. Phelps to actually think about her life for the first time ever. Government censorship prevented the people from ever being exposed to material that would make them question. For the first time, she thought about her l...
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...very night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning”. In Fahrenheit 451, technology is so pervasive, so omnipresent, that it takes up all of everyone’s time. They are so immersed, they never have any time to think about anything, All of their free attention is sucked up by their addiction and reliance on technology, that they never think about their own happiness, or that of the people around them. They never stop to question their happiness, so they assume that they are happy. If one never thinks about it, then they automatically assume that it is okay. For instance, if one doesn’t think about an animal attacking them, then there must not be one, for if there was, then they’d be thinking about it. This is an instinctive trait in humans, and the Fahrenheit 451 government is using it to their advantage.
Imagine living in a world where you are not in control of your own thoughts. Imagine living in a world in which all the great thinkers of the past have been blurred from existence. Imagine living in a world where life no longer involves beauty, but instead a controlled system that the government is capable of manipulating. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, such a world is brought to the awareness of the reader through a description of the impacts of censorship and forced conformity on people living in a futuristic society. In this society, all works of literature have become a symbol of unnecessary controversy and are outlawed. Individuality and thought is outlawed. The human mind is outlawed. All that is left is a senseless society, unaware of their path to self-destruction, knowing only what the government wants them to know. By telling a tale of a world parallel to our own, Bradbury warns us of a future we are on a path to -- a future of mind manipulation, misused technology, ignorance, and hatred. He challenges the reader to remain open-minded by promoting individualism, the appreciation of literature, the defiance of censorship and conformity, and most importantly, change.
In the futuristic world of Fahrenheit 451 books and literature are outlawed. The population is only influenced by the technology and media they are allowed to see. They are mainly influenced by the parlors, or the T.V.’s on the walls. These parlors show exactly how the family should be and it shows no other type of family. The parlors take away a person’s ability to think for themselves. The government wants everybody to be the same. It’s human nature to want to control others or be in charge. That is why the government is continuously overseeing everything the media sends out. The people in Fahrenheit 451 believe themselves to be happy and never question what they are being told. The people in the book are ignorant to what is really going on. Ignorance vs. Happiness is a main theme in the book. In life ignorant people believe that they are happy, but in reality they don’t know what is truly going on around them so their happiness isn’t legitimate.
Fahrenheit 451 is an exotic novel by Ray Bradbury published in 1953. The theme of this story is happiness vs. discontentment. People in this book are unhappy because society does not allow books which is very different from our society and some people in Fahrenheit 451 actually enjoy reading books which makes them unhappy that they are not allowed to. In this society they can’t because if you read books you will die.
Fahrenheit 451 depicts a dystopian society created by its government. The main characters are Montag, Mildred, Clarisse, and Beatty. The people in the society don’t pay attention to meaningful activities. For example, when they are on the highway they have to make the billboards 200 feet long instead of 20 so the people could actually see them. Even when they live together they do not interact with one another. Every person has been censored by the government. The government has taken away all of the freedom from the people. The firemen now burn books and start fires instead of putting them out. Fahrenheit 451 emphasizes that a government's attempt to create a utopia can lead to dystopia because in the novel people are uneducated, careless
Fahrenheit 451’s Relevance to Today Fahrenheit 451’s relevance to today can be very detailed and prophetic when we take a deep look into our American society. Although we are not living in a communist setting with extreme war waging on, we have gained technologies similar to the ones Bradbury spoke of in Fahrenheit 451 and a stubborn civilization that holds an absence of the little things we should enjoy. Bradbury sees the future of America as a dystopia, yet we still hold problematic issues without the title of disaster, as it is well hidden under our democracy today. Fahrenheit 451 is much like our world today, which includes television, the loss of free speech, and the loss of the education and use of books. Patai explains that Bradbury saw that people would soon be controlled by the television and saw it as the creators chance to “replace lived experience” (Patai 2).
As can be seen, intellectual thoughts have been thoroughly abolished throughout the country. Still, to further elaborate, most of the characters inside Fahrenheit 451 do not seem to care about anything. This descends to the point where wives do not even care about their children or husbands. “”I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it’s not bad at all. You heave them into the ‘parlor’ and turn on the switch. It’s like washing clothes; stuff laundry in and slam the lid”” (93). Mrs. Bowles explains that she doesn’t even have to care or tend to her children, all she has to do is to put the children in the ‘parlor’, or the TV room. The shortness and spontaneousness of relationships in Fahrenheit 451 is even shown in the pop culture. “”Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night…”
Haruki Murakami once said, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the society loses its power and purpose because individuals lose their ability to live a full life involving relationships, meaningful activities, and rich ideas.
‘“Yes, 'Everybody's happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way”’ (Huxley 91). People in the World State are put in one of several different classes, and are designed to perform only certain duties, but beyond that, they have little to no control over what they do with their life. In Fahrenheit 451, people are targeted even if they have so much as a book. There is no freedom to do anything that doesn’t go along with society. In certain countries of the modern world, especially the United States, citizens have what seems to be an unlimited amount of freedom, and both of these novels can deepen the understanding of readers and teach them the significance of being
Imagine a world, where kids brutally kill one another for fun; where the word “family” is irrelevant. Where the government monitors your every move, and where information is censored. Fortunately, the only society as dehumanizing as the one described is within the dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. In this novel, the main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman that burns books. This unique dystopian novel tells the exhilarating story of him slowly coming to the realization that his “perfect” civilization is not so flawless anymore. He first realizes that he’s not so happy with his life when he meets Clarisse, his neighbor, as she questions the norms of the society. He then begins to study his wife, Mildred Montag, and realizes she isn’t happy either although she doesn’t admit so. This slow, but decisive process results in Montag
The society in Fahrenheit 451 lacks love, faith, and happiness because it lacks relationships. Rabin suggests that relationships are the key to happiness because human beings naturally thrive off of human interactions and finding their purpose. Subsequently, one can presume that happiness is similar in both texts because they imply that happiness in self-made.
Fahrenheit 451 is a book where society seems to be weird and far away from today's society. In the book, happiness is a quality not achieved in its reality; it is just superficial. Our society is one where people are building to an environment like that. Neither Fahrenheit 451's society nor ours care enough about important things of life. Both societies try to make things easier for themselves, when it is not necessary. Our society has aspects very similar with the book's life style.
The Dalai Lama once said, “Without technology humanity has no future, but we have to be careful that we don’t become so mechanised that we lose our feelings.” He is warning the people of today's society. Dalai Lama states that we can’t let technology take over, or we will stop expressing feelings because we will be addicted and obsessed with technology. Just like Dalai Lama, the author of the novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, writes about the danger of technology taking over this particular society in the book, which leads to citizens not expressing feelings. These examples show that the society in Fahrenheit 451 is dystopian.
Happiness plays an important and necessary role in the lives of people around the world. In America, happiness has been engrained in our national consciousness since Thomas Jefferson penned these famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (Jefferson). Since then, Americans have been engaged in that act: pursuing happiness. The problem however, as Ray Bradbury demonstrates in his novel Fahrenheit 451, is that those things which make us happy initially may eventually lead to our downfall. By examining Guy Montag, the protagonist in Fahrenheit 451, and the world he lives in we can gain valuable insights to direct us in our own pursuit of happiness. From Montag and other characters we will learn how physical, emotional, and spiritual happiness can drastically affect our lives. We must ask ourselves what our lives, words, and actions are worth. We should hope that our words are not meaningless, “as wind in dried grass” (Eliot).
Everyone has a time in their life when reading, philosophy, and continual deep thinking becomes all too much. That irrational frustration that make one wish that it all would just go away or that TV and games would replace them. The universe of Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury takes this idea to a whole new level. In the book, society has actually made books illegal. It’s the job of Firemen to burn them if they should come across any. While some believe Fahrenheit 451 has little to say to readers today, it actually has a powerful message for readers today because things in Fahrenheit 451 have occurred in the past and this story has molded the U.S.
“Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I am not happy, I am not happy.” -Guy Montag (****Bradbury) Living in a society that blinds its citizens into believing in false happiness leads to a multitude of problems later. The lifestyles that were lived in Fahrenheit 451 are similar and can be connected in many ways to what is seen today. Although one could argue that these two societies are different because of their ‘book burning,’ it is clear to see the commonalities shared in technology and their personal relationships.