Technology In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

An English poet and satirist, Charles Churchill, once claimed that “the best things carried to excess are wrong.” Ray Bradbury, science fiction writer, would agree. His novel, Fahrenheit 451, suggests that an excess reliance on technology can bring destruction in various forms. While observing the dystopian society through Montag’s eyes, the readers can detect the disadvantages to the surplus of technology. The audience can thoroughly comprehend the theme by analyzing different literary elements utilized by Bradbury and by having some background knowledge of the historical time period when the novel was written. One literary element that helps clarify the theme is the element of motif. Throughout the book, the audience is reminded of the

By comparing characters in the Fahrenheit 451, the audience sees that technology also has an effect on the personalities of the characters. Influenced by the evils of technology, Mildred and her companions have the same characteristic traits: unemotional, naive, and distant. The show that the women were watching was brutal as it depicted “three White Cartoon Clowns [chopping] off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again,” but they seemed to be unaffected as they watched the performance in awe (Bradbury 90). The exposure to the shows pacify the characters’ emotions leaving them to be insensible and unresponsive. This affects them in other aspects of their lives such as relations with their husbands and

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was written in the late 1940s to the early 1950s in the United States. To start, this time period was after people had witnessed the Manhattan Project and its devastating effect on many countries. It was initiated “in 1939, [when] the German-born scientist Albert Einstein had informed President Roosevelt about the possibility of creating a superbomb. It would produce a powerful explosion by splitting the atom” (Stokesbury). This led to the creation of the atomic bomb. This innovative bomb was then dropped “...on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, another B-29 dropped a 22-kiloton implosion-type fission bomb on Nagasaki. These bombs largely destroyed both cities” (Kroenig). The effects of the atomic bombs were disastrous; more than 150,000 people were killed instantly by the bomb and many more were killed from radiation and other aftermath (Hall). Similarly the immensity of the nuclear weapons is translated into Bradbury’s science fiction novel. At the last scene, the city “erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and found dead” (Bradbury 153). The readers have a better interpretation of