Oppression In Fahrenheit 451 Essay

Oppression in Fahrenheit 451 is internal, not external

In Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, the oppression is internal, not external. But it is equally external rather than internal. Because of the many minorities, which could each be seen as an internal, oppressing themselves, and their sub-minorities, making the original minorities majorities, oppressing minorities. So, the oppressing parties are both internal and external, voiding the statement to be discussed. So, this essay will further detail this invalid statement, and provide and explore a substitute statement.

Oppression in Fahrenheit 451 cannot be pinned on the internal or the external, because of the hazy line between them, their interconnections and many levels. As Captain Beatty

says in the text, “Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.” This is just a small few of all the minorities present. If one were to oppress itself, internally, it would also be oppressing all the minorities that sprout from it, oppressing them externally. Were we to zoom out further, to where all we saw was the individual and society the line between internal and external is still blurred. Were the oppression internal, from the individual, than for it to truly be oppression this self-oppression would be required to be harboured by most, in essence, society. So the oppression cannot be internal, nor external, for society is not a separate entity, it is an organic machine whose cogs are individuals.
However, this essay now lacks a topic, a statement to explore. To create a new topic, that is similar to the previous, we shall look at the faults of the previous, and how to address them. The root of the problem was it’s black and white, internal or external, to rigid to encompass and explain a society. It does not provide the opportunity for the human mind, the creator and creature of society to explain itself, while it is the best qualified to do so. As such, the question must be open, allowing for the human mind freedom to the full extent. So, I substitute, what is the root of oppression in Fahrenheit 451?
To answer this new question we need to know who is being oppressed, who is oppressing them and the cause of this oppression.

To do this we will look back at the past, how the situation became as it did in the world of Fahrenheit 451. As Beatty explains, the changes began around the time of the industrial revolution. Life sped up. Books, once the pleasure of few, painstakingly written in ornate handwriting went into print, and books entered the main stream. As people read more and more it became a challenge to read as many books as possible, something you could boast about to your neighbours. Books became shorter, “classics cut to fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary résumé.” They were stripped down to their very basics, lacking the details that brought them alive. The masses had with their impatience driven the goodness out of the subject of their impatience. Books fell out of favour, and eventually the government banned books. In their place came the screens, filled with things that the viewer could see, making them, in the eyes of most, true. The government manipulates the masses through this immediate and believable outlet, and shorten education, making a population easy to manipulate. For the intellectuals, and others who still choose to read, the government oppresses them by disallowing books. So, this oppression comes from the people, who grew tired of books, and a

government seeking to manipulate it’s people taking advantage of the societies rejection of books. But deeper, further back, the seeds of oppression were sown by a thirst, a thirst to read books, and the gradual mutation of that thirst into greed and jealousy.
In conclusion, the proposed essay topic was black and white, lacking the complexity of life, or the opportunity for that complexity to be created. The substituted topic was ‘what is the root of oppression in Fahrenheit 451?’, which was far more open ended, allowing complexity and freedom. The oppression came from the change from thirst to greed, the greed to be have read all the classics, keep up with your neighbours, which ended up stripping away all of the complexity from books, leading to societies rejection of them.