Hope McKelvy Aragon English March 13, 2024 Distraction and the Illusion of Happiness in Fahrenheit 451 “It was a pleasure to burn” (Bradbury 1). The illusion of happiness can brainwash us into one way of thinking. The effects can be devastating. The main theme of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is that distraction does not constitute happiness; this is best shown throughout the media in the book, the medication, and the Seashell earphones. Firstly, the media in the book is one of the main distractions. The media serves as a distraction from the ongoing conflicts and numerous atrocities happening worldwide. One instance is when Beatty consistently emphasizes the importance of individuals conforming to a singular belief. Beatty displays this belief …show more content…
Secondly, the medication, such as the sleeping pills, serves the purpose of distraction and maintaining compliance among individuals. To illustrate this point, Mildred shows weakness when she takes the entire bottle of sleeping pills to mitigate the isolation and despondency she feels. Montag is in shock when he discovers Mildred in cardiac arrest. The day after, she showed no signs of recollection or concern. Montag is confused and tries to reason: “‘Maybe you took two pills and forgot and took two more, and forgot again and took two more,’ Montag says. ‘And were so dopey you kept right on until you had 30 or 40 of them in you’” (Bradbury 16). This shows how the pills are made to fill a void and blur the lines between happiness and distraction. Case in point: the handyman said that they get nine or ten of these cases a night. They got so many that they built a special machine for them (Bradbury 27). This emphasizes the problem they face in society: avoiding the world around them they are trying to escape, detaching themselves from what is real and what is harming them to cope, they resort to utilizing drugs inadvertently, subjecting themselves to further
...ildred sounds like dread which would be fitting since she must be depressed as she attempted suicide in the beginning of the book.
Are you really happy? Or are you sad about something? Sad about life or money, or your job? Any of these things you can be sad of. Most likely you feel discontentment a few times a day and you still call yourself happy. These are the questions that Guy Montag asks himself in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book people are thinking they are happy with their lives. This is only because life is going so fast that they think they are but really there is things to be sad about. Montag has finally met Clarisse, the one person in his society that stops to smell the roses still. She is the one that gets him thinking about how his life really is sad and he was just moving too fast to see it. He realizes that he is sad about pretty much everything in his life and that the government tries to trick the people by listening to the parlor and the seashells. This is just to distract people from actual emotions. People are always in a hurry. They have 200 foot billboards for people driving because they are driving so fast that they need more time to see the advertisement. Now I am going to show you who are happy and not happy in the book and how our society today is also unhappy.
“Remember when we had to actually do things back in 2015, when people barely had technology and everyday life was so difficult and different? When people read and thought and had passions, dreams, loves, and happiness?” This is what the people of the book Fahrenheit 451 were thinking, well that is if they thought at all or even remembered what life used to be like before society was changed.
You take advantage of your life every day. Have you ever wondered why? You never really think about how much independence you have and how some of us treat books like they’re useless. What you don’t realize is that both of those things are the reason that we live in such a free society. If we didn’t have books and independence, we would treat death and many other important things as if it were no big deal. That is the whole point of Ray Bradbury writing this book.
In Federalist 10 James Madison argued that while factions are inevitable, they might have interests adverse to the rights of other citizens. Madison’s solution was the implementation of a Democratic form of government. He felt that majority rule would not eliminate factions, but it would not allow them to be as powerful as they were. With majority rule this would force all parties affiliate and all social classes from the rich white to the poor minorities to work together and for everyone’s opinion and views to be heard.
To start, the novel Fahrenheit 451 describes the fictional futuristic world in which our main protagonist Guy Montag resides. Montag is a fireman, but not your typical fireman. In fact, firemen we see in our society are the ones, who risk their lives trying to extinguish fires; however, in the novel firemen are not such individuals, what our society think of firemen is unheard of by the citizens of this futuristic American country. Instead firemen burn books. They erase knowledge. They obliterate the books of thinkers, dreamers, and storytellers. They destroy books that often describe the deepest thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Great works such as Shakespeare and Plato, for example, are illegal and firemen work to eradicate them. In the society where Guy Montag lives, knowledge is erased and replaced with ignorance. This society also resembles our world, a world where ignorance is promoted, and should not be replacing knowledge. This novel was written by Ray Bradbury, He wrote other novels such as the Martian chronicles, the illustrated man, Dandelion wine, and something wicked this way comes, as well as hundreds of short stories, he also wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV. In this essay three arguments will be made to prove this point. First the government use firemen to get rid of books because they are afraid people will rebel, they use preventative measures like censorship to hide from the public the truth, the government promotes ignorance to make it easier for them to control their citizens. Because the government makes books illegal, they make people suppress feelings and also makes them miserable without them knowing.
In the novel, Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury demonstrates why illiteracy can lead to a dystopia. On the contrary, the short story The End of the whole Mess written by Stephen King reveals why having too much literacy can be horrific to the world. Steve jobs once said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” In both the novel and the story people try to set up certain rules or are born with talent that is driven to change the world for good, nevertheless they end up in dystopias.
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar;...” These are the thoughts of Lord Byron, a british poet, on experiencing the power of nature. A similar sentiment is seen in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as one of the main themes. The thought is expressed a little differently, but it can be seen in many situations throughout the book. Although people try to feel alive using objects or superficial feelings, nature and people are what truly bring a person the feeling of being alive.
The North Korean government is known as authoritarian socialist; one-man dictatorship. North Korea could be considered a start of a dystopia. Dystopia is a community or society where people are unhappy and usually not treated fairly. This relates how Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 shows the readers how a lost of connections with people and think for themselves can lead to a corrupt and violent society known as a dystopia.
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).
According to Ray Bradbury, four hundred fifty-one degrees is the temperature at which books burn, thus giving the inspiration for his novel’s title, Fahrenheit 451. In it, fireman Guy Montag, a fireman, wrestles with social norms and his own developing beliefs to uncover truth, emotion, and purpose. Through his endeavor, Montag must face robotic animals, ruthless coworkers, and treachery from his own wife, all with a considerably smaller team on his side. As the journey progresses, readers see new sides to Montag, unveil connections between two supporting characters, and must predict the outcomes of further years.
Set in a dystopic future where books are burned instead of read, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury has a tone of defiance and enlightenment throughout, which is also seen in the painting Joan of Arc 's Death at the Stake by Hermann Anton Stilke. They deal with society and challenging beliefs, as well as being true to what they know is right.
According to MailOnline, having lots of friends in real-life, and on social networks, can ultimately make people less sociable, and increase sadness. A lot of people in today's society might consider themselves happy but are actually the opposite. Having a lot of friends makes people feel like they don't need to be an extrovert and can eventually cause them to become unhappy. In the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the same problem is present in the futuristic society. Almost all of the people in the book are either always on some sort of device or they are so consumed in the robotic society that they never take the time to think about things. This causes a lot of the characters in the book to be discontent, but not all. There are still a few that do take the time to think about things and are not always on a device.
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.
(OxfordDicktionaries.com). This also falls in line with Fahrenheit 451 because in the story because part