The Destructive Nature of Technology Exposed in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

Identity and modernization are affecting the world, fiction or nonfiction. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Montag the main character comes into conflicts with many characters when he starts to question what everyone else just accepts. Clarisse, a peculiar teenager, opens his eyes to this new way of thinking, which cause him problems, but was the best thing for him. In the story Fahrenheit 451 the character Montag struggles with technology and modernization along with identity, he struggles with these because of he isn't sure who he is, there are to many distractions that won't let him figure who he is, and nobody will tell him what's actually going on in the world in government behind the parlor walls and the other distractions.

First, identity will come into play with Montag hardships in this book many times. Clarisse says, "'You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.' He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other" (Bradbury 23-24). She gets him to open his eyes a little on their first encountering, and each time after that more and more. When she dies I think it finally hits him that things are going on in this world that the government purposefully doesn't want them to see. After seeing the Mechanical Hound Montag asks, "All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the house are recorded in the master file downstairs. It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound's ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids, perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Rea...

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... hasn’t, like her old husband’s death, which caused her to cry.

Montag fights with identity and technology and modernization because he doesn’t know who he is as a person or what he should believe in, the noise the government puts up wont let him think, and no one will tell him what’s really going on the world behind the distractions. Montag really all he wants to do in this is come into terms with his self, and when doing that become happy. Truly happy, not the kind of happy Mildred pretends to be with her “family” on the parlor walls, but the kind of happiness that comes from deep human relationships. Substance is what truly makes people happy, the laughs from a human relationship and the joy of reading a good book is what separates humans from mindless robots.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “Fahrenheit 451.” New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks 2013.