Fahrenheit 451 Literary Analysis

In Fahrenheit 451, I don’t think “ignorance is bliss” is true because people that don’t have knowledge of what’s going on around the world, aren’t truly happy. In the novel, people wear their happiness like a mask because when someone doesn’t want to have to deal with life’s problems they resort to technology so they don’t have to deal with their difficulties. The society in this novel thinks and acts as if they are happy but in reality they are trying to close out the world around them by watching tv. For example, while Montag was reading the poem “Dover Beach” aloud to Mildred, Mrs. Phelps, and Mrs. Bowles, Mrs. Phelps got emotional about what it was saying. “Mrs. Phelps was crying. The others in the middle of the desert watched her face squeezed itself out of shape.

“Dover Beach” was about longing and wishing for happiness, which reflects the way the women were feeling. Even after the women left, Mildred took sleeping pills so she could go to sleep and forget about what she just heard. From this statement, it shows how Mildred is blocking away all the negativity, which is a reality for everyone, and taking the easy way out and going to sleep. Mildred represents the average person in their society about the way she acts and feels about most things. Faber exclaims,“We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality” (Bradbury 85-86). This is clear because people in this society choose to ignore the negative and undesirable things and only choose to look at the positive things in which life contains. People prove to be narcissistic in this novel, and only do things if they want to do it and also in order to help