Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: Rough Draft

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Shaina Lee English II Pre-Honors, Period 5 February 26, 2013 Fahrenheit 451- Rough Draft Fahrenheit 451, a science fiction novel, depicts a story about a futuristic world in the middle of a nuclear war. The government of this future forbids its people from reading or taking a part in individual thinking. During this time, the law against reading is new so the government is taken on a task of destroying all of the books. This is where we meet the main character named Guy Montag, a fireman. Him and his crew go around and burn books in libraries, and homes. Although Bradbury began writing the book in 1950, he shows the ability of predicting the future in Fahrenheit 451, making chilling forecasts we see in our world today. Three aspects of…show more content…
Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about a materialistic society that has forgotten social interaction with each other. Bradbury examines the personal response of an individual who is in conflict with the majority in his society and whose occupation is abhorrent to him. Fahrenheit 451 centers upon the personal crisis of Montag, a young fireman whose job consists of burning books. He finds his life increasingly meaningless and eventually comes to reject the too-simple, clichéd values of his environment. He experiences loneliness in a society where people are constantly entertained without time given to reflection and personal development, activities often associated with the reading process. The more complicated fine distinctions of the world of books are available to him only when he leaves his reductionist society. Bradbury does not realize just how unhappy he is with his life and the world he lives in until Clarisse talks about her "strange" family, the one that actually converses with each other and enjoys nature. Bradbury show just how much Clarisse’s way of life is unaccepted in Montag’s world with the quote spoken by Clarisse, “White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days” (9). This shows just how shallow Montag's society has become. Nobody thinks, one of many Bradbury predictions that have come true. In…show more content…
In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury emphasizes a world in which books are of little importance and forbidden. Firemen like Montag, burn books without knowing the reasoning behind it. In Bradbury's novel, education's emphasis on technology leads to a culture where people understand how things are done but never bother to wonder why things are done. Such an education discourages people from developing their creative abilities, and as the narrative points out several times, those who cannot build destroy. The result is a society where fanatical, destructive behavior, such as the firemen's book-burning, flourishes. People in Montag’s society have been conditioned to think the suggestion of reading is a laughable subject as expressed in the quote, “Do you ever read any of the books you burn?’
He laughed. ‘That's against the law!’ ‘Oh. Of course.’” (8). The people in Montag’s society are banned by their government to read anything that has any philosophies or intellectual thought. The people do not want to read books in the first place because books do not give them the immediate interaction response the televisions walls does. They do not want to have to think and use their mind. This is expressed when Mildred is yelling at Montag about how useless books are and she says, “Books aren't people. You read and I look around, but there isn't anybody!” (73). People like Mildred are not used to and comfortable with having to use their creative

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