Theme Of Conformity In Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury tells the intriguing story of a futuristic American society where the people live without thought, feelings, or intellect. The story tells of Guy Montag who embarks on a journey that takes him from being exactly like his fellow firefighters into a driven bibliophile. The firefighters receive alarms of hidden books within a home and immediately go to burn them without thinking of what they are destroying. The people in Montag’s society are all very mechanical and drone-like due to the conformity that the government has inflicted upon them. This society is also very advanced in technology and has several things that help to assure the simplicity of the people including parlor television walls and a mechanical hound.

Montag is one of the inhabitants of this society that slowly broke through the conformity of the government. Montag had always been just going through the motions like he always had been, burning books and then coming home to his wife, Mildred, to spend more time with their ‘family,’ the television program that continued on and on with thoughtless conversations that assured that the people watching them had no time to ponder anything outside of that show. Montag was unlike these people. Clarisse, the deceased neighbor of Montag, was the first person to make Montag notice his differences. Montag had always noticed the differences in Clarisse, and noticed that by interacting with her his personality started to change from the standard

The frightening invention known as the mechanical hound that firefighters keep in their firehouses as both a play toy and a weapon is very humanlike, possibly more so than the humans in that society. The hound is a robot that is programmed to find, kill, and track a certain prey. When it’s job is done or when it no longer has a mission, it becomes dead again waiting for the next prey to kill. Montag notices the possibilities of what the hound can do when programmed against someone and feels as if it is programmed against him. “‘It doesn’t like me’... ‘It doesn’t like or dislike. It just ‘functions”... ‘All of those chemical balances and percentages...it would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound’s ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids perhaps.’”(26) The Hound tracks it’s prey by tracking the chemicals of that person through a system in it’s nose. This sudden action against another living being is similar to someone disliking someone and acting against that person. The Hound is also made human my making it similar to the people of that society. Beatty states that the hound simply ‘functions,’ that it doesn’t have any feelings. People of that society fall under the category of simply functioning without feelings as they do everyday. Everything is simply facts, the Hound chooses a prey based on the chemicals it is set to find. The people in the society only