Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, was born in Illinois on August
22, 1920. Bradbury never received an education beyond high school, but
he supported himself by selling newspapers on street corners while writing stories and books. Eventually finding success as a science fiction
writer, he also wrote for the popular television shows The Twilight Zone
and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Bradbury finished the first draft for what would be his most popular book in just nine days. The final draft of Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, and it was adapted into a stage presentation and a film.
Plot
The story takes place in a futuristic American society in which people do
not read books because reading is illegal. In this fictional society, people
do not enjoy nature, think for themselves, or spend time alone. Instead,
they drive excessively fast, watch too much television on wall-sized
screens, and listen to the radio on small units attached to their ears.
The protagonist’s name is Guy Montag, who is a fireman in an era
when firemen start fires, rather than put them out. Montag burns books
for a living. One day, he meets a seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse
McClellan. She forces Montag to acknowledge the emptiness of his life,
and when she is killed by a speeding car, his dissatisfaction with life and
society only increases.
Montag responds to a notice that an old woman has a stash of hidden books, and when she chooses to be set on fire along with her books rather than live without them, Montag is shocked. He keeps his own
stash of books inside an air-conditioning vent. During his period of disillusion, he stops going to work. His boss, Beatty, goes to his house and
explains to Montag how the law started. Beatty explains that special interest groups began objecting to books that offended them, and soon all
writers were writing books that seemed exactly alike because they did not
want to offend anyone. Society decided to just burn all books rather than
permit conflicting opinion. “We must all be alike,” Beatty explains. “Not
everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone
made equal.… A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it.”
Beatty instructs Montag to take one last read of his books before incinerating them, and Montag spends the night in a reading frenzy.
When Montag realizes the task of reading all his books in one night
is impossible, he enlists the help of a retired professor he knows named
Faber. Montag knows Faber will help him understand all of what he
reads, but instead Faber tells the fireman that he needs not only the
books, but also the leisure time in which to read them. More than that,
he needs the freedom to put into action the ideas he learns from them.
He explains that what Montag is searching for is the meaning inside the
books, not the books themselves when he tells him, “Do you know why
books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what
does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book
has pores.”
Faber and Montag devise a scheme to overthrow the status quo (current state of affairs). Faber is responsible for getting books reproduced
and printed, and Montag will plant books in the homes of firemen in an
attempt to discredit them and destroy the repression of censorship. The
two men communicate via a two-way radio earpiece.
When Montag’s wife betrays him and calls the fire station, Beatty
forces Montag to burn his own house to the ground. When that is done,
Montag is arrested. He manages to contact Faber to warn him. Faber
heads for St. Louis in search of a printer and Montag escapes to join
forces with a nationwide underground network of book lovers who have
memorized literary and philosophical classics. In the meantime, war has
been declared, and the country is bombed. Montag and his new intellectual friends set off in search of survivors in the hope of rebuilding civilization. Themes and impact
Despite the fact that Fahrenheit 451 does not give a precise explanation
as to why books are banned in the future, the theme of censorship
throughout the novel is clear. The idea that two main groups of factors
converged to result in censorship is the cornerstone of the story. The first
group of factors leads to a general lack of interest in reading and include
competing forms of entertainment such as television and radio as well as
an excess of stimulation that prohibits people from concentrating on one
thing. The second group of factors leads to an attitude of hostility toward
reading, with a focus on jealousy. People do not like to feel inferior to
those who have read more and so have more knowledge or intelligence.
It is important to note that while the censorship theme is obvious to
critics and readers alike, Bradbury insisted in a 2007 interview with the
newspaper L A. Weekly that the novel is not about censorship. He intended instead to write a story about how television destroys any interest
in reading literature and creates a society that wants only bare-bones facts,
not detail or substance. From his perspective, the guilty party is not the
government (for imposing censorship), but the people (for turning away
from reading in favor of other forms of less intellectual entertainment).
This purpose becomes clear in another theme of the novel, which is
the conflict between knowledge and ignorance. The duty of these futuristic firemen is to destroy knowledge and promote ignorance in an effort
to make everyone equal. But Montag is filled with doubt about his mission when he meets Clarisse, Faber, and the old woman who willingly
gave her own life. In the end, Montag realizes his true mission is to battle the beliefs of the society in which he lives, which also touches on the
theme of individualism versus society.
Bradbury’s novel has been banned in schools across the country, not
only for some of its language, which is considered by some to be offensive, but for its anticensorship message. The censorship of a novel that
speaks out against censorship is an irony not lost on the author, who
claimed that about seventy-five separate sections from the novel had
been deleted in the 1979 and 1987 reprints of the novel. Editors at
Ballantine Books made these deletions.
Another irony is that the society Bradbury describes in Fahrenheit
451, with its massive television screens, compact portable radio devices, and overall societal inability to remain focused and tuned in for long periods of time, has largely come to fruition in the twenty-first century.