Fahrenheit 451 vs Our Society By: Andrew Yalcin Fahrenheit 451 was one of Ray Bradbury’s best works. It was written in 1953 and shows a surprisingly accurate prediction of the future. The society was unwilling to bring their eyes away from distractions and the authorities were making sure it stays that way by the censorship of books. The inconvenient truth was denied and comfort was found in ignorance. Everything that caused controversy was exterminated. Everyone was a sheep attaching themselves to useless things instead paying attention to things that could’ve saved their lives. The character of this book, Guy Montag, was a fireman who started fires rather than putting them out. His job was to burn books and sometimes the houses they were contained in. On his way home, he met a teenage girl who lived in his neighborhood, Clarisse McClellan. This young girl has heavily influenced Montag because of how much she stood out from the rest of society. She had a clear understanding of how messed up everything was and how no one ever said anything important. She had a deep love for life and the nature that surrounded it. She noticed the things no other could. …show more content…
The same night Montag met Clarisse, he found that his wife, Mildred, has overdosed on sedative.
He called the emergency hospital and had a few men sent to his home to pump her stomach. The men had no look of concern and stated that they got these kind of duty calls all the time. Montag “had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death.” pg21 When Mildred woke up the next morning, she had no memory of the night before and denied Montag’s explanation. She continued her lifeless day staying indoors in front of her three television walls like the rest of the
flock. Montag was called down to burn an elderly woman’s home that was filled with outlawed books. During the process of spreading kerosene around the house, he swiftly snatched a book before anyone noticed. “Montag had done nothing. His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in each trembling finger, had turned thief…” pg17 The woman refused to leave the house and lit the fire that demolished her house as well as her life, leaving a mark on Montag’s memory. The next day, he called his Captain claiming that he was sick so he could reconsider his job. Captain Beatty visited him and gave a long lecture about many true things in our society and revealed his suspicion towards Montag. Eventually, Montag was caught and ended up having to kill Captain Beatty. He was now a fugitive on the run. He headed towards the old railroad tracks to find a group of people who want to fix society. When he arrived, he met man named Granger. He explained to Montag that the police needed to give the chase a happy ending, so they killed a random pedestrian in Montag’s place. After a short amount of time, jets from an enemy country zoomed overhead and destroyed the city. The group was no longer afraid and knew what they had to do. They travelled back to the city to reconstruct society. The society we live in now is a reflection of the society in which Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451. There is a constant demand for better technology and entertainment, very soon we will have to suffer the consequences as they will. The children living in their society have become very violent towards one another. They kill others and wreck things just for fun. The children of our society are becoming more and more like they are. Kids kill children just to have a good time. Bradbury did a nice job predicted what the society would be like in the future.
Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction book that still reflects to our current world. Bradbury does a nice job predicting what the world would be like in the future; the future for his time period and for ours as well. The society Bradbury describes is, in many ways, like the one we are living in now.
In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a fireman named Guy Montag is hired to burn books and the houses that encase them. He happily does his job until his new seventeen-year-old neighbor named Clarisse McClellan talks of a past where people fought fires instead of starting them, she sparks the start of a self-discovery that is completed by an English professor named Faber and an intellectual book-memorizing group lead by a man named Granger. Montag is persecuted for his actions when his wife, Mildred, reports him to the fire station, and must run away. After he finally escapes, Montag watches the city go down in flames from air strikes. Mildred is a negative influence to Montag, and Clarisse is a positive influence.
Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a very hostile environment. The world is ridden with wars. In fact, according to the book, there had already been two atomic wars and a war in the process. There were ten million soldiers deployed but the media lied and said only one million were sent out. Also, they live in an age of ignorance. They burn books to keep them from learning things and would rather lie to them than risk having them get upset. Family and religion has been replaced with television. A yearly salary was reduced to a mere $6,000. This shows that the value of the money decreased.
Guy Montag is the protagonist and fireman who presents the dystopia through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, a man in conflict about it, and one resolved to be free of it. Through most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes what he hears.
The theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 can be viewed from several different angles. First and foremost, Bradbury's novel gives an anti-censorship message. Bradbury understood censorship to be a natural outcropping of an overly tolerant society. Once one group objects to something someone has written, that book is modified and censorship begins. Soon, another minority group objects to something else in the book, and it is again edited until eventually the book is banned altogether. In Bradbury's novel, society has evolved to such an extreme that all literature is illegal to possess. No longer can books be read, not only because they might offend someone, but because books raise questions that often lead to revolutions and even anarchy. The intellectual thinking that arises from reading books can often be dangerous, and the government doesn't want to put up with this danger. Yet this philosophy, according to Bradbury, completely ignores the benefits of knowledge. Yes, knowledge can cause disharmony, but in many ways, knowledge of the past, which is recorded in books, can prevent man from making similar mistakes in the present and future.
Montag is realizing wrong his world really is. He wants to change it too. He says “ Im going to do something, I dont know what yet but im going t do something big.” He doesnt know what to do yet because at this point he hasnt figured out the “missing peice”. Montag says “ I dont know. we have everything we need to be happy, but we arent happy. Something is missing.” then he starts to understand that books are the key to knowladge and knowledge is what they need. he says “There must be something in books that we cant imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there, you dont stay for nothing.” And this is the turning point of the book because now montag is ready to take
Him and his crew go around and burn books in libraries, and homes. & nbsp; I think the theme of the story is that there are many facets to a personality that are first visible. The book is narrated in third person. At the beginning of the book, we see Guy Montag as a ruthless man who enjoys his job very much. Later on he discovers that he does not enjoy his life, it is merely a fake mask. He slowly discovers this in himself when he meets a teenage girl named Clarisse, who is his new neighbor.
Mildred, Montag's wife always talks about her “family” on the T.Vs on the parlor walls. Mildred cannot accept any reality that contradicts her world on the three parlor walls. Mildred is so unhappy with reality that she uses seashell earbuds to block out the world around her. She puts the earbuds in to replace reality with her fantasy “family”. Whenever Montag tries to talk to Mildred when she has her seashell earbuds in it takes him awhile to get her attention. “Late in night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her seashell was tamped in her ear again, and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling. (Bradbury
Guy Montag is the main character in the story; he is the pillar on which all other characters rest, and the character which all other characters revolve around. The effect Bradbury creates of him is that he is an ignorant, naïve person. His faith in all humanity is crippled from the first page, it seems, and is further strained by Clarisse McClellan. Montag's actions are most often rash, with little or no thought attached to them ,which is implemented by Bradbury as a metaphor to Montag's socialization: acting for the moment on impulse, rather then thinking deeply before acting. This is illustrated on page 70, when he makes books out to be some sort of godly invention; something that would give sense and reason to the world, a problem solver, if you will. He also forms deep attachments to people who seem willing to be his allies, which further illustrates Bradbury pouring in a sense of incompleteness in the development of Montag, the person. In addition to this, Montag is constantly compelled to resist society, and resist the status quo. Upon his reading of the first book, the immensity and complexity thereof, he has a frustrated air throughout the book, as well as one who is confused, trying to find deeper understanding of the world and not coming to terms with reality at some points. Again this is illustrated not only on page 70 (see above) but also in the later sections of the book where he seeks out Faber's help in understanding. Deeper yet is his willingness to be swayed. Once told to do something he most often does it, which can be described on page 38, when he is told by one of his fellow firefighters "Don't just stand there idiot ..Kerosene". Immediately his body seems to become controlled by some outside force that forces him into a craze to burn books.
Mildred never engages to have deep conversation with her husband about their marriage or telling him her feelings towards him . In Fahrenheit 451 Mildred attempted to commit suicide because of her pain and emptiness.Mildred is a childish grown women she is very small minded and refuses to understand her husband at all and has no desire to either. As you can see how Mildred acts in the story you can tell that she doesn't really care for anybody,she is only worried about herself and nothing more, she could care less about her husband or anybody , In my opinion i feel like Mildred is very cold heart and she isn't happy at all in the story . When i say that Mildred isn’t happy it is because she doesn't really know how to express herself , or her feelings towards her husband , I believe deep down she really loves her husband and doesn’t want to leave him but she doesn't really know how to separate the society that she is living from her husband who she
Fahrenheit 451 is about a fire man named Guy Montag, who 's job is not to put out fires but to set them. The Novel is about a city that books are band from and news papers are dead and the only media they are allowed is tv. The reason why books are illegal is because books contain knowledge, and thats something that the city doesn 't want them to have. Guy Montag’s job was to set every book he saw on fire, every house that contained the books, and anyone who lived among those books. Humanity was already destroyed by then and none of the people that lived in the city had any recognition of what was going on because no one knew that kind of knowledge. Along with the burning books, nature and real connections with other people have pretty much been shut out, and the result? A society that is now blind by it’s own ignorance and is being destroyed by it without anyone even
The Majority of people today believe that the society in Fahrenheit 451 is far-fetched and could never actually happen, little do they know that it is a reflection of the society we currently live in. In Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 books are burnt due to people's lack of interest in them and the fire is started by firemen. Social interactions is at an all time low and most time is spent in front of the television being brainwashed by advertisements. In an attempt to make us all aware of our faults, Bradbury imagines a society that is a parallel to the world we live in today by emphasizing the decline in literature, loss of ethics in advertisement, and negative effects of materialism.
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).
Much of what the future holds are consequences of the events that have already taken place. Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 is a story about a lifestyle in the future that has evolved from our present, but in a seemingly different world. There is no flow of ideas, and the main purpose in a person's life in those days was to relax, not think, and be happy. Despite the seemingly unreality of the world in the future, the author is using it as a cautionary tale of what may become of our society. Bradbury stresses his views on how best to keep our society's system of government checks and balances, technological advances, and its fluidity of ideas.
Guy Montag is a fireman who is greatly influenced in Ray Bradbury's novel, Fahrenheit 451. The job of a fireman in this futuristic society is to burn down houses with books in them. Montag has always enjoyed his job, that is until Clarisse McClellan comes along. Clarisse is seventeen and crazy. At least, this is what her uncle, whom she gets many of her ideas about the world from, describes her as. Clarisse and Montag befriend each other quickly, and Clarisse's impact on Montag is enormous. Clarisse comes into Montag's life, and immediately begins to question his relationship with his wife, his career, and his happiness. Also, Clarisse shows Montag how to appreciate the simple things in life. She teaches him to care about other people and their feelings. By the end of the novel, we can see that Montag is forever changed by Clarisse.