Fahrenheit 451
written by Ray Bradbury
“We need not to be left alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long has it been since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”(Bradbury 52)
Guy Montag had a typical life until it was bothered by seventeen-year-old Clarisse McClella. She said the most unusual things. She said that firemen like him used to fight fires, not start them. She told him how she liked to stand in the rain or just sit and think sometimes. She asked him why he became a fireman who burns books for a living. She asked him if he was happy. She was an odd one, but she got Montag thinking.
In this futuristic society people are constantly watching the parlor walls and listening to their seashell radios. People are drowning in a flood of entertainment and don’t ever think anymore. This society described in this book, published fifty years ago, resembles our society’s culture in an unsettling way.
Montag was just as caught up in his routinely life as anyone else, but after meeting Clarisse he is woken up. He starts seeing his world for what it is. He sees his wife Mildred nearly kill herself after overdosing on sleeping pills, a typical case. He sees her and everyone for the empty people they are. This new perspective frightens him and suddenly he sees the books he is burning as a fireman as a solution to the void he feels. This feeling is amplified when the firemen burn down a woman’s hidden illegal library along with the women herself who refused to leave. He has to wonder what books hold that makes the government want to incinerate them and yet make a women rather be incinerated with her books then to live without them, “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a women stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”(Bradbury 51).
Now Montag is frantic to discover the mystery of books, he steals, he asks questions; he doesn’t want to be empty anymore, but it is like filling a sieve with sand. Montag’s mission and desperation to fill the emptiness makes the reader think. Montag must know; what is so special about books?
This book relates to us now more than ever. Because it wasn’t George Orwell’s vision of the future that has come to pass, it was Aldous Huxley’s and Ray Bradbury’s. We are not censored like in 1984 we are flooded with information. There is so much noise that a person will be stuffed full of information and still know nothing of importance. For instance I don’t know all about Plato, but I know all about the tv show friends Friends. In a way Montag has suffered the same fate. He knows the summary of Hamlet as told in two minutes, but knowing what Hamlet is about is not the same as reading every word. In Montag’s world all the classics have been shaved and spliced down to bytes that their short attention spans can tolerate. It is like reading a Sparknotes overview of To Kill a Mockingbird instead of reading the book. It might help to pass the test, but the experience of the novel is missed. It is the way a story is told and the words and thoughts used that make a book so amazing and full. And it is Montag’s struggle to learn this that makes Fahrenheit 451 so spectacular.
I love this book because it succeeds in telling a fantastic story and holds up a mirror to the reader. In this instance it is not just the protagonist that changes by the end of the book. Bradbury said things that made me remember why I love books so much.
