Fahrenheit 451 (1953). For Discussion or Writing

Along with Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 helped establish Bradbury’s literary reputation and earn his works a place in the American literary canon. A popular text filled with social relevance, the book was adapted for film in 1966 and for the stage in 1979. As did many of his longer works, Fahrenheit 451 started out as a short story, titled “The Fireman,” which was published in Galaxy Science Fiction (1951).

Set in a futuristic society that bans books and fosters complacency through mind-numbing media, the novel focuses on Guy Montag, fireman number 451, who works for a firehouse that burns homes reported to have books inside. Once, in the distant past, the station put fires out instead of setting them, but the past, especially in a world without books, without history, remains a mythical shadow.

Montag’s need to discover the past drives the narrative and leads him to seek answers in books. He makes friends with a neighbor, 17-year-old Clarisse McClellan, who questions Montag about his occupation and challenges his unexamined acceptance of society, forcing him to face his own discontent. Frustrated further by his wife’s commitment to their superficial world, Montag sees Mildred’s suicide attempt as a consequence of their empty lives. Montag becomes obsessed with finding out about the taboo texts; eventually the firefighters target his home after Captain Beatty, the fire chief, discovers Montag’s subversive activities. Seeking help from a man named Faber, a retired English professor, Montag escapes the city and finds a vagabond group of intellectuals, led by a man named Granger.

They are “the Book People,” readers who memorize texts, the preservers of the written word. Montag memorizes Ecclesiastes, the one book he has found and read, and joins them. Ecclesiastes is a book of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, that ponders human existence, takes a dark view of life, and serves as a repository of wisdom and truths. These words soothe Montag; he finds comfort in the ancient text. Just as he is calming from his flight, bombs strike the city, and an atomic war “begins and ends in an instant.” The story concludes as Montag walks with “the Book People” toward the dead city, reciting Ecclesiastes to himself and looking toward a future “with everything to think about and much to remember.”

At the onset of the novel, Montag is satisfied with his life. The opening chapter describes the “pleasure” he derives from watching “things eaten, to see things blacken and changed.” Montag knows the power he wields and takes pride in his social status. He is a respected man, a defender of the peace. A few unexpected encounters, however, cause Montag’s world to come apart. During his initial conversation with Clarisse he is uncomfortable, musing that he can literally see “himself in her eyes.” Later, as he reflects upon her strange questions, the reader senses that he sees, as he looks back, his own buried discontent. Montag struggles to make sense of his world with mentor figures, his wife and a strangely close family, and through Clarisse’s anecdotes. When his faith in the system shatters, he scrambles to find some direction; through much of this process he acts mistakenly and makes misguided decisions. He is an antihero, an ordinary man who is not perfect.

The overarching theme in Fahrenheit 451 is censorship. The futuristic world that Bradbury creates censors knowledge. Bradbury crafts the book with the present and the many forms of censorship that occur in our society kept in mind. Thus, while Bradbury speaks to a “present” that is now some 60 years past, the novel is darkly prophetic. Bradbury’s novel features the censorship of books most prominently but also describes a world that limits individuality, freedom of thought, and creativity. As Faber explains to Montag, the books represent dangers the society tries to eradicate: “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books.” The novel depicts a world opposed not only to free thought but also to intellectualism, with liberal arts—subjects such as sociology, philosophy, history, and literature—considered especially dangerous.

These ways of seeing the world stimulate individual thinking, which leads to conflict, something the society seeks to prevent at all costs. As Montag demands answers to his questions about the past, his behavior becomes more erratic. After he steals a book from a job and calls in sick, Montag attracts the attention of his boss, Captain Beatty, who can be viewed as Montag’s foil: Beatty’s values and beliefs contrast with the younger fireman’s and serve to highlight Montag’s exceptionality in the context of the story. Beatty is zealous in his support of the social structure; through him Bradbury fills in what has transpired in the past: the history of the firehouse, how books began to be banned, and how “the word intellectual . . . became the swear word it deserved to be.” An ironic character who burns books yet is also highly literate, Beatty quotes literature and knows history. He is not a numb citizen like Mildred; Beatty is a creator of the system, whereas Mildred is a product of the oppressive social order.

Beatty tells Montag that the trouble with books started when special interest or minority groups found certain passages or works offensive and sought to remove them. He describes a world of growing populations and with them, increasing amounts of minority groups living in ever-closer proximity to each other: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!” Here Beatty raises the challenge of living in a diverse culture. He suggests that the differences between these splintered groups are petty; nonetheless, they disrupt the harmony of the mass population. Beatty describes how, before books began to be banned, abridged copies of various texts circulated with the controversial bits removed.

The media began to address the entire mass audience in an attempt to pacify smaller groups and entertain the whole. The result, Beatty claims, is a peaceful and happy culture. Yet what Beatty calls “peace” and “happiness” translates practically into obedience and complacency. This is illustrated by the reference to Mildred’s suicide attempt as a common phenomenon in the city. What he describes is a natural progression in the shaping of culture, but Beatty does not volunteer the underlying truth that the government’s subtle yet highly effective influence has shaped the course of events. By de-emphasizing authorship and ideas and instead supporting the proliferation of mass media, the establishment numbs people to their differences rather than learning to work with them.

Beatty explains that severe abridgment of texts was the first step. It eliminated diverse and conflicting ideas. In many of these passages we can see parallels to Bradbury’s own experiences as a writer. Bradbury writes long, luxurious passages filled with detail. His images are rich and vivid. As have many widely read authors, Bradbury has often been asked to abridge his works for anthologies and has received unsolicited suggestions to change content. In the coda at the end of Fahrenheit 451 the author writes, “There is more than one way to burn a book.”

He rejects the idea of condensing literary works and argues that every detail is important in his works. Through Faber, the author defends his position on high-quality literature: “The more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can fit on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. . . . Telling detail. Fresh detail.” Bradbury’s works have been considered controversial; by the time he wrote Fahrenheit 451 he had witnessed the censorship of literature from schools as well as some book burnings. Written in a time when pieces of literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were under attack, Bradbury’s novel addressed pressing issues that we still face today.

These very real issues provide the inspiration for his fantasy. The ramifications of censoring texts are horrifying. Doing so changes knowledge itself. Omitting offending details pacifies the public, but it also simplifies the content, reducing knowledge to an elementary level. Unchallenged, the citizen’s intellect is numbed; ignorance evolves into fear. A significant intellectual gap develops in Montag’s society. The majority of people escape through the mass media; however, a few still cling to a lifestyle associated with books. Enter the firemen. The reassignment of the firemen illustrates the intrusion of the government on ideas: “We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.”

What Beatty describes is a natural shift away from books altogether that the people demand. An examination of Mildred exposes this myth. Advertising controls her desires. Mildred listens to a constant stream of ads on the Seashell radio that fits in her ear whenever she is not in the TV parlor—even in her sleep. She seems to be satisfied with her life; however, her suicide attempt suggests that subconsciously the emptiness of her existence haunts her.

The next day she cannot even recall her actions. Characters in the novel like Mildred are fragile, both mentally and emotionally. They are threatened by philosophy and literature. When Montag reads a poem to Mildred and her friends, Mrs. Phelps breaks down in tears, Mrs. Bowles becomes enraged, and Mildred is consumed with embarrassment. They distrust the strange words, and each of the three women calls the firehouse, exposing Montag to Captain Beatty.

Montag makes a deliberate break from his society; however, he also seeks safety in the perspective of an old man he had met in the park a year prior. An ostracized professor turned recluse, Faber is all too aware of this phenomenon. Fear eats away at him; he is a victim of the society and, ironically, illustrates the role intellectuals have played in the demise of academia. He is full of fear and acknowledges his own complacency as he watches the world move further and further away from books and art. While Beatty explains the inferiority felt by the layperson, Faber illustrates the sometimes-arrogant superiority of the educated. As he and Montag put together a half- baked plan to wage their own private rebellion, Faber tries to control Montag’s actions through a two-way earpiece. There is a schism between Montag, who is the major actor in changing the status quo, and Faber, the academic who has all the ideas but none of the courage to act. Montag seeks him out for aid in finding his own independence, but in the moment of crisis, Faber becomes just another voice in his ear. His intentions are genuine, but he ends up functioning just as the Seashell and Beatty do. Thus, the animosity felt by the greater population for its brightest minds is warranted.

Much of what we, as 21st-century readers, experience as the past in the narrative had not yet come to fruition when Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 (1953). We can now drive 70 miles per hour on the highways; advertisements fill up our empty spaces, while cell phones and portable music fill up our quiet spaces. Rural areas continue to diminish. Our culture witnesses pursuits of fugitives on television, occasionally in live broadcasts, and television is an ever-increasing part of the home. Perhaps the novel is more haunting today, not only in its portrayal of the future, but also in its similarities to the present. As do many writers and historians, Bradbury portrays a negative social phenomenon, in this case censorship, while hoping to prevent it.

The story ends with outcasts’ making a new beginning. As in The Martian Chronicles, the survivors must use lessons of the past to construct a more intentional and careful future, one where the society will admit complexity and dissension rather than masking conflict with uniformity. The principal tool in that struggle is memory. The characters in Fahrenheit 451 have no knowledge of what preceded them, and that handicaps their ability to build autonomous lives.

While the foundation of a new society lies in the memory of the Book People, the new society must also remember how they arrived at a place where ideas were outlawed, “the temperatures at which books burn” was Fahrenheit 451, and the simplification of mass-released texts mollified the public, making them easy to control. The book, therefore, embraces the careful recording and studying of history and argues that remembering the past is crucial to constructing the future.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. How do images of the natural world function in the novel? Discuss Clarisse’s connection with nature. How does this affect her view of the world?

2. Montag hides books at the beginning of the novel but does not read them. What becomes significant then is why he finally reads. Analyze the events that lead to Montag’s desire to read. Consider the other characters who influence his thinking and decision making. Evaluate why he ultimately begins reading books and why reading is significant to Montag and to the novel.

3. While Beatty ultimately foils Montag and Faber’s plans, do the plans the two make seem significant to the novel and its overall message? With that in mind, imagine that Beatty did not interrupt the two rebels. Would the two of them have been able to save the civilization eventually? Why or why not? Additionally, consider why Bradbury creates Beatty as a foil. Is he providing a social commentary by doing so? Why or why not?

4. Part of what makes the novel so powerful is its troubling ending. Do you think Ray Bradbury’s conclusion in Fahrenheit 451 does an adequate job of conveying a message? If so, why? If not, how would you change the ending to make your message more forceful?

5. At the center of the novel lies an important issue to America: freedom of speech, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Research the First Amendment at a trustworthy Web site such as http://www.firstamendmentcen- ter.org/ After learning about what the amendment says, evaluate the novel in light of free speech in today’s world and the many ways it has been challenged. With your research in mind, is Fahrenheit 451 still relevant today? Is free speech in danger? Why or why not? Write an essay on freedom of speech in the novel.

6. Compare and contrast Beatty and Faber. How does each use his knowledge? Are they both manipulative? Why or why not? What does the reader learn from the juxtaposition of these characters?

7. Considering the elements of Fahrenheit 451 that depict technology in the 21st century, is Bradbury’s future possible? Why, or why not?