Why should you read “Fahrenheit 451”? - Iseult Gillespie
“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure
to see things eaten,
to see things blackened and changed.”
Fahrenheit 451 opens in a blissful blaze
- and before long,
we learn what’s going up in flames.
Ray Bradbury’s novel imagines a world
where books are banned
from all areas of life -
and possessing, let alone
reading them, is forbidden.
The protagonist, Montag, is a fireman
responsible for destroying what remains.
But as his pleasure gives way to doubt,
the story raises critical questions
of how to preserve one’s mind in a society
where free will, self-expression,
and curiosity are under fire.
In Montag’s world, mass media
has a monopoly on information,
erasing almost all ability
for independent thought.
On the subway, ads blast out of the walls.
At home, Montag’s wife Mildred listens to
the radio around the clock,
and three of their parlor walls
are plastered with screens.
At work, the smell of kerosene
hangs over Montag’s colleagues,
who smoke and set their mechanical
hound after rats to pass the time.
When the alarm sounds they surge
out in salamander-shaped vehicles,
sometimes to burn whole
libraries to the ground.
But as he sets tomes ablaze day
after day like “black butterflies,”
Montag’s mind occasionally wanders to the
contraband that lies hidden in his home.
Gradually, he begins to question
the basis of his work.
Montag realizes he’s always felt uneasy -
but has lacked the descriptive words
to express his feelings in a society
where even uttering the phrase
“once upon a time” can be fatal.
Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world governed
by surveillance, robotics,
and virtual reality-
a vision that proved remarkably prescient,
but also spoke to the concerns of the time.
The novel was published in 1953,
at the height of the Cold War.
This era kindled widespread
paranoia and fear
throughout Bradbury’s home
country of the United States,
amplified by the suppression of information
and brutal government investigations.
In particular, this witch hunt mentality
targeted artists and writers who
were suspected of Communist sympathies.
Bradbury was alarmed at
this cultural crackdown.
He believed it set a dangerous
precedent for further censorship,
and was reminded of the destruction of
the Library of Alexandria
and the book-burning of Fascist regimes.
He explored these chilling
connections in Fahrenheit 451,
titled after the temperature
at which paper burns.
The accuracy of that temperature
has been called into question,
but that doesn’t diminish the novel’s
standing
as a masterpiece of dystopian fiction.
Dystopian fiction as a genre amplifies
troubling features of the world around us
and imagines the consequences
of taking them to an extreme.
In many dystopian stories,
the government imposes constrictions
onto unwilling subjects.
But in Fahrenheit 451,
Montag learns that it was
the apathy of the masses
that gave rise to the current regime.
The government merely capitalized on
short attention spans
and the appetite for
mindless entertainment,
reducing the circulation of ideas to ash.
As culture disappears,
imagination and self-expression follow.
Even the way people talk
is short-circuited
- such as when Montag’s boss Captain Beatty
describes the acceleration of mass culture:
"Speed up the film, Montag, quick.
Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here,
There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out,
Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh!
Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom!
Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests.
Politics? One column, two sentences, a
headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes!"
In this barren world, Montag learns
how difficult it is to resist when
there's nothing left to hold on to.
Altogether, Fahrenheit 451 is a portrait
of independent thought
on the brink of extinction -
and a parable about a
society which is complicit
in its own combustion.
