Ray Bradbury’s writing style in Fahrenheit 451 was very different from John Steinbeck’s writing style in The Grapes of Wrath, and even more different than Ernest Hemingway’s writing style in The Old Man and the Sea. Bradbury did not go into much detail about most things, which Steinbeck did for all of The Grapes of Wrath, and it was not very frank, like Hemingway’s was in The Old Man and the Sea. Bradbury spends most of the time on metaphors and similes, so it is not that easy to read quickly, you have to slow down to fully grasp what he was trying to get across in the first place. Maybe that was on purpose, because the setting in the book explains that books got shorter and everybody read things quicker, and to novel writers, that is a nightmare of a future.
The narrator in this story is a third person, but this time instead of it being a third person omniscient, like in The Grapes of Wrath and The Old Man and the Sea, it is only a third person limited omniscient because we can only hear the thoughts of Guy Montag, instead of everybody’s thoughts.
The writing in the book reveals that Bradbury fears the time when people lose interest in things like long novels and strolls in the park, and focus on things like T.V. or short days at the Fun Parks, where the kids break windows and things like that, and when they drive, they will go too fast to see the beauty of the land right outside of their window. “Christ is one of the ‘family’ now. I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs” (Bradbury 81). I think this quote reveals just how far Bradbury thinks the world might go to if we live watching our T.V.’s.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment