Fahrenheit 451 Summary

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“The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and Literate Culture in Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz” Review Rough Draft

Spencer, Susan. “The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and Literate Culture in Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol. 32, no. 4, 1991, pp. 331-342.

Summary In “The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and Literate Culture in Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz”, Susan Spencer quotes Eric Havelock to argue that “’we would never be able to burn enough books or eliminate enough intellectuals, to be able to return to the warm room of blissful ignorance’” (332), meaning that no matter how much of an effort people may give in trying to become an illiterate society, …show more content…

She then goes on to tell us that the people in the novel “sought comfort and revenge by destroying all texts and all individuals connected with learning, escaping into a simple agrarian lifestyle very different from Bradbury’s high-tech nightmare” (336). She is describing the phenomena seen in the novel called the Age of Simplification. She claims that the people in this particular society blamed the fact that people became too literate and technologically advanced that they led to their own destruction, so they ended up destroying the very source of their own destruction. Then came the fact that Leibowitz saved some texts from destruction, but he was in turn killed. The texts on the other hand managed to be passed down because of the fact that he hid them in the fallout shelter than Francis later discovered. Spencer contrasts this from the society seen in Fahrenheit 451, in that the society seen in Fahrenheit 451 was already technologically advanced and eventually started to fall out of the idea of reading texts. The loss

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