Fahrenheit 451: Question 3

The main theme of this book seems to be censorship, but more of how new technologies like television and how it “destroys the interest in reading literature” (Johnston 9). The people of the time of the book just sit around all day and watch television and they can even talk to it, and they get much attached to it. When Guy Montag asks his wife, Mildred, to turn off the T.V. parlour where the giant television walls are she says “That’s my family” (Bradbury 49).

When Captain Beatty shows up to the house to talk to Guy, he starts talking about how he knows he took a book or two. He says that every Fireman goes through it, and they get over it. He revealed to Guy that fireman actually were at one point in time supposed to put out fires, not start them. He reveals how the process started to this future world: “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-nine dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for references. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more” (Bradbury 55). This reveals that it is less like the world in George Orwell’s 1984 because in 1984, the government was the censor, but in Fahrenheit 451, it is the people who decided that books were useless.

At the end of the book, before the city was bombed, Granger talks about how they will wait until they are able to once more put the books back onto paper and wait “until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing” (Bradbury 153).

Johnston, Amy. "Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted - Page 1 - News - Los Angeles - LA Weekly." Los Angeles News, Events, Restaurants, Music LA Weekly. 30 May 2007. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.