Fahrenheit 451 Research Paper

The World of the Future (Title Still in Progress) Control feels good, people say, “take control of your life … control who is in your life … control your day … seize your day … carpe diem … control, control, control!” In today’s age of technology, we have many ways to control what we do, but is all of this perceived control giving us a false sense of control? Is the illusion that everything is fine just a facade strengthened by the desires of more impatient, feel good, pleasure-seeking society? This is the reality of a dystopian America in the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Things like virtual families and the decline and outlaw of books in the active search for quick and fast gratification. This gives most people in that society the

Well back in 1953, when Fahrenheit 451 was published, Bradbury forewarned us of such future if we were to mess everything up so badly, yet so gracefully that, in the words of the adage, Murphy’s law, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Bradbury knew this so well that he predicted that if we, as a collective society, allowed things to go wrong, we will bring to life the mechanical hounds of the Fahrenheit world with today’s equivalent of drones, bring about nuclear war through a hot-headed leader, and our own virtual“families” that we’ve created to fill the missing sense of belonging that can’t be found in the real world,

Bradbury’s drone equivalents were the mechanical hounds, not-so-canine killing machines with “sensitive capillary hairs in [their] nylon brushed nostrils” along with “[their] eight legs spidered under … rubber-padded paws”. Not to mention the hound has “a four-inch hollow steel needle … [that] inject[s] massive jolts of morphine and procaine” (Bradbury 22). Also having a “‘nose so sensitive [it] can remember and identify ten thousand odor indexes of ten thousand men.’” which allows for it to track and kill its victims quite effectively (127). Where does this draw a parallel with drones? Well drones operate for very similar purpose, albeit a much more destructive purpose as they also destroy things such as buildings. But why bother highlighting such a comparison? Well drones and the hounds give us the ability to kill without doing it ourselves. This means that we can’t truly feel anything when we end a life because we’re not there to see and feel the true suffering of the person we’ve just slayed. And who wants to