Fahrenheit 451: Question 6

This is one of the best books on the reading list that we could choose our third book from. I have not read the other ones yet, but I’ve heard what they are about, and I think that for me, this book was a good choice for my third book.

Last summer, for English 232, I chose to read George Orwell’s 1984 which I really liked because it presented an alternate future that could possibly happen if mankind did not learn from their past mistakes and fight for what they believe in. Fahrenheit 451 is more similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World because unlike 1984, Brave New World was a society that was created by people over a long period of time. In Brave New World, people took vacations often to get away from reality and there were strict laws that you had to abide to, like going to group meetings for “social” time.

The future of Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World is more probable because the people are probably going to get upset and rebel if the government started burning books on their own, but it was not the government’s idea. The population just grew tired of books and eventually just stopped reading and lost the significance of reading novels. Seeing the opportunity to make the citizens happy and less educated, and so more easily repressed, the government stepped in and started the “Firemen”. People are more inclined to go along with things if they are the general consensus of the population, not just by the government’s power.

The main reason why I think that we read books like Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984 is because it warns us of the slim paths that people walk and that if humans were to slip up, there would be people there to take advantage of the situation. Another common themes shared between the aforementioned books are things like hop and human nature to have ups and downs throughout history. They all end with a kind of hope that maybe people will see what they have done wrong; they just needed everything to go wrong to see how bad it really was.

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