Analyzing Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'
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Fahrenheit 451: Final Draft
In 1953, Ray Bradbury wrote his novel Fahrenheit 451. Since its debut, Fahrenheit 451 has been regarded as a masterful work of literary fiction with powerful political commentary, akin to George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. According to Willis McNelly, “For Bradbury, a metaphor is not merely a figure of speech, it is a vital concept, a method he uses for comprehending one reality and expressing it in terms of another; it permits the reader to perceive what the author is saying” (Connor 408). Bradbury’s entire novel is one huge metaphor for how humanity is losing touch with what is important and he uses the characters to convey his messages about censorship. Bradbury uses the dialogue …show more content…
between characters to explain the purpose, meaning, and detrimental effects of censorship. Throughout his novel, Ray Bradbury uses interpersonal interactions and dialogue to convey the paramount theme of censorship.
The Purpose & Meaning of Censorship
In order to set the stage for the rest of his novel, Bradbury must convey an overpowering sense of censorship and the heavy consequences that come with it. As we begin to learn about Montag, his life, and the futuristic world in which he lives, Bradbury ensures that the impression of censorship is engrained in the very fiber of Montag’s character. One day, as Montag is speaking with his Captain from the firehouse, Captain Beatty says, “[Firemen] were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me” (Bradbury 56). Here the reader learns for the first time about the theoretical purpose of what Montag does for a living. Bradbury sets two primary characters against each other and portrays to the audience that each has good intentions, but it is up to the reader to decide which intentions are better. For Beatty, the purpose of censorship is to keep people from feeling anything upsetting.
For example, Beatty explains how the entire process of censorship in the form of book burning began. It started as a peace-keeping process that evolved into an exaggeration. Beatty recalls how it all started and tells Montag, “Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag” (Bradbury 57). For Beatty, if any one person is upset by something someone else has written, illustrated, or expressed in any form of media, it has to be done away with. Because the purpose of censoring nearly everything is to keep people from getting upset, Bradbury’s world needs something that is seen as pure and beautiful to erase the ugly nature of intellect. Therefore, fire is used as the solution to everything and homes are built with incinerators in the kitchen – the very place of creation and creativity in the home (Smolla, 2009). As a fireman, Montag is expected to understand this concept. For Montag, though, the ability to read books and explore their meaning is more valuable than avoiding upsetting feelings, so he sets himself against the notion of censorship.
Throughout his novel, Bradbury gives powerful examples of what censorship means to various types of people. To Beatty, the censorship of book burning is about keeping the peace in society. For Montag, it is an evil that has stripped Montag of the ability to learn and satisfy the innate curiosity that has been suppressed in him. In line with Montag, Professor Faber suffers greatly, as well. According to Faber, books are so hated because, “They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless” (Bradbury 79). Thanks to the way the world has evolved through censorship, people are afraid of anything that seems to have a pulse or life. One such person who prefers censorship is Montag’s dear wife.
Several times throughout the novel Bradbury portrays Montag’s wife, Mildred, as a sad victim of censorship. She succumbs to passive suicide and a shallow life of preferring television characters to her own husband’s company. This is never more evident than when Mildred finds the book under Montag’s pillow and reacts as though it is a lethal weapon or illicit drug (Bradbury 53). Instead of wanting to understand her husband or help him in his endeavor, she reacts in absolute distaste and wants to get Montag caught for his possession (Bradbury 53). In this scene, Bradbury illustrates how censorship has transformed free thought and the bond between a married couple into something unrecognizable – all because of the powerful message of rampant censorship that has been hammered into the minds of the people in Montag’s world. When Montag reveals his stash to his wife, “Mildred backed away as if she were suddenly confronted by a pack of mice that had come up out of the floor. He could hear her breathing rapidly and her face was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide…. She ran forward, seized a book and ran toward the kitchen incinerator” (Bradbury 63). As Bradbury conveys Mildred’s intense reaction, he is defining the severity of the censorship dogma and how it has taken over the average person’s will.
However, despite the fact that the people closest to him prefer censorship, Bradbury sets Montag against the world by illuminating his enduring fascination with why books were created. In the beginning stages of his personal revolution, Montag realizes that, “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over” (Bradbury 49). It is this realization of the devastation of what his job actually means for the world that causes Montag to resolve himself to trying to get his hands on as many books as possible and fighting his own internal battle of intellectualism versus censorship.
Censorship Versus Intelligence
Bradbury portrays two types of people in his novel. The first is the class of people who have read or seek to read books. This includes Montag, Beatty, Clarisse, and Faber. Beatty, though the antagonist, has read many novels and can quote them off hand. However, he uses his knowledge to dissuade others from wanting to read books. In fact, Beatty would rather the world be filled with the second class of people. The second class of people includes those who are numb, mindless, and drone-like. These people are those who go along with the hollow rules of Bradbury’s dystopia. Indeed, Beatty believes that, “…the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar” (Bradbury 55). Here Bradbury exemplifies how censorship is attacking human intellectualism and individuality. Beatty tries to convince Montag that books are no good and one should give up any aspiration of broadening one’s intellect.
Bradbury explains how censorship caused the devolution of literature and intellectualism through Beatty.
Beatty begins by explaining how things were in the nineteenth century, when everything was in “slow motion” (Bradbury 52). But the world wanted things to be faster, so the result was, “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-line dictionary resume” (Bradbury 52). The purpose of condensing everything transformed from a societal thirst for knowledge to a thirst for things to talk about with friends (Bradbury 52). As priorities shifted from intelligence to socialization, intellectualism was seen to be nothing more than “time-wasting thought” (Bradbury 52). Censorship caused literature and written communication to be dumbed down to something that the lay-person could understand and discuss at social gatherings. The priority was taken away from intellectualism and placed on being able to be social and relate to …show more content…
neighbors.
Bradbury communicates the breadth and devastation of censorship largely through Beatty’s dialogue. According to Brown, Beatty is the primary target of censorship (56). Because Beatty has read many of the censored works and is privy to the history of how censorship took over the world, he is simultaneously the antagonist as well as a victim of that which he promotes through his work as a fireman. Indeed, Beatty himself demonstrates that he, too, has suffered the effects of censorship by describing to Montag how the ban on books came to be. Beatty recalls the tone of society saying, “Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive” (Bradbury 55). According to Beatty and to researcher Smolla (898) it was the people, not the government, who enacted widespread censorship. The priorities of the public shifted and the government simply further encouraged the disdain for intellectualism by persecuting anyone who tried to save intellectualism. According to Hamblen, the reader should not be surprised that Montag will eventually fail and be caught because Beatty describes the fall of the written word by explaining how the media took over and gradually became truncated. In this way, Beatty is foreshadowing Montag’s demise (Hamblen 818). Montag was destined to fail, just like intellectualism.
Bradbury’s professor character, Faber, represents intellectualism. When Faber and Montag are first getting to know each other, Faber recalls when he first noticed that intellectualism was dying thanks to censorship. Faber tells Montag, “That was the year I came to class at the start of the new semester and found only one student to sign up for Drama from Aeschylus to O’Neill. You see? How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths” (Bradbury 85). The purpose of higher education was to train new generations of intellectuals. But censorship put an end to higher education and therefore no new intellectuals were entering the world to stand up for the works that were being destroyed. In the same way, as education was done away with, so was leisure time, which Faber states is when people contemplate the world and their experiences, and grow intellectually. Faber explains to Montag the distinction between leisure time now and what it used to be by saying, “If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall television… [The television] tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’” (Bradbury 80). When people usually sat around and contemplated the world – like Clarisse’s family often did – now people have replaced this time with virtual distractions or reckless hobbies. Faber’s experience with censorship is the personification of the death of intellectualism.
Censorship Versus Humanity
Montag’s world is full of robotic creatures and artificial life.
For example, the mechanical hound and Mildred’s “family” are commonplace creatures, even though they have no essence of humanity. However, due to widespread censorship, the lack of humanity has spread like a disease to infect humans as well. When Mildred and Montag are discussing a tragic case of suicide, Mildred shows her inhumanity when she says, “She’s nothing to me; she shouldn’t have had books. It was her responsibility, she should’ve thought of that. I hate her. She’s got you going and next thing you know we’ll be out, no house, no job, nothing” (Bradbury 48). Censorship has muted the feelings – compassion, sympathy, empathy – that humans are supposed to feel for one another. This sentiment is echoed by Mrs. Phelps who describes her marriage as nothing more than an acquaintanceship: “Anyway, Pete and I always said, no tears, nothing like that. It’s our third marriage each and we’re independent. Be independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don’t cry, but get married again, and don’t think of me” (Bradbury 91). Because censorship has stripped people of their emotions and humanity, they cannot even know what it means to be devoted to someone and to care when they have
died.
Captain Beatty is often portrayed as the voice of reason in Bradbury’s novel. However, he is the voice of reason for the enemy. As such, Beatty’s perspective on human individuality is the epitome of what censorship has done to humanity. Beatty says that, “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal” (Bradbury 55). Rather than celebrating individual differences, the new censored world wants everyone to be the same and therefore manageable. Even more so, Beatty asserts that, “Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes ager a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the county. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything” (Bradbury 57). Not only has censorship silenced intellectualism and humanity, but it has silenced human rituals and sentimentality. Bradbury uses Beatty’s hard persona to emphasize the point that it there is no emotion or cause to remember people who have been loved and lost, than there is no point of living.
The Tragic Result of Censorship
Montag begins his novel by describing one of the activists of censorship, Montag. However, as the novel progresses, we see Montag change into a protector of the things he once destroyed, and become a victim of censorship himself (McGiveron 177). This evolution of Montag’s persona is emulated in symbols of censorship throughout the novel. According to Zipes, the heroes of Bradbury’s novel are symbols of the books themselves (183). Therefore, when the books are being censored and burned, so too are the main characters. Nearly every single image in Bradbury’s novel is either a catalyst for censorship (the metallic hound, kerosene, fire, the household incinerator) or a victim of censorship (the characters, books, newspapers, universities). The transformative process comes to the forefront when Montag realizes that he and his wife are doomed if they stay on the same path of succumbing to censorship. Early on, Montag tells his wife, “We’ve got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we’re in such a mess, you and the medicine nights, and the car, and me and my work. We’re heading right for the cliff, Millie” (Bradbury 63). Without everything that has been censored, without freedom, everyone wants to kill themselves and does so passively.
Montag suffers several tragedies throughout Bradbury’s novel. In particular, he sees his wife passively killing herself. As he tries to convince her of the detrimental situation the world is in, he tells her, “You want to see that snake? It’s at Emergency Hospital where they filed a report on all the junk that snake got out of you! Would you like to go and check their file? Maybe you’d look under Guy Montag or maybe under Fear or War” (Bradbury 69). Censorship has transformed life for everyone in Montag’s world into one of fear and constant war with bomber jets flying overhead and nuclear warheads being launched off at other countries. Montag realizes that it is not the war that he needs to fear, but the censorship that is draining the life from everyone. Montag recalls all the people that have been lost in such a short time when he says, “My wife’s dying. A friend of mine’s already dead. Someone who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago” (Bradbury 77). Even though censorship was meant to keep people from getting upset, it has resulted in people killing themselves or being killed. In this way, censorship has been a complete failure.
Throughout his novel, Bradbury depicts many examples of censorship and the way in which censorship affects the characters. The rampant tone of censorship in Fahrenheit 451 causes great suffering, diminished intelligence, diminished humanity, and even numerous tragic deaths. Bradbury uses the dialogue between characters and interpersonal situations to explain the purpose, meaning, and detrimental effects of censorship. In doing so, Bradbury’s tone is conveyed consistently throughout his work and the reader is left with a powerful impression of Bradbury’s intention.
I.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012. Print.
Brown, Joseph F. “As the Constitution Says: Distinguishing Documents in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” The Explicator, 67.1 (2008): 55-9.
Connor, George E. “Spelunking with Ray Bradbury: the Allegory of the Cave in Fahrenheit 451.” Extrapolation, 45.4 (2004), 408-18.
Hamblen, Charles F. “Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in the Classroom.” The English Journal, 57.6 (1968): 818-24.
McGiveron, Rafeeq O. “Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” The Explicator, 54.3 (1996): 177-80.
Seed, David. “The Flight from the Good Life: ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in the Context of Postwar American Dystopias.” Journal of American Studies, 28.2 (1994): 225-40.
Smolla, Rodney A. “The Life of the Mind and a Life of Meaning: Reflections on Fahrenheit 451.” Michigan Law Review, 107 (2009): 895-912.
Zipes, Jack. “Mass Degradation of Humanity and Massive Contradictions in Bradbury’s Vision of America in Fahrenheit 451.” No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, 182-98.
Professor
Class
Date
Fahrenheit 451: Final Draft
In 1953, Ray Bradbury wrote his novel Fahrenheit 451. Since its debut, Fahrenheit 451 has been regarded as a masterful work of literary fiction with powerful political commentary, akin to George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. According to Willis McNelly, “For Bradbury, a metaphor is not merely a figure of speech, it is a vital concept, a method he uses for comprehending one reality and expressing it in terms of another; it permits the reader to perceive what the author is saying” (Connor 408). Bradbury’s entire novel is one huge metaphor for how humanity is losing touch with what is important and he uses the characters to convey his messages about censorship. Bradbury uses the dialogue …show more content…
between characters to explain the purpose, meaning, and detrimental effects of censorship. Throughout his novel, Ray Bradbury uses interpersonal interactions and dialogue to convey the paramount theme of censorship.
The Purpose & Meaning of Censorship
In order to set the stage for the rest of his novel, Bradbury must convey an overpowering sense of censorship and the heavy consequences that come with it. As we begin to learn about Montag, his life, and the futuristic world in which he lives, Bradbury ensures that the impression of censorship is engrained in the very fiber of Montag’s character. One day, as Montag is speaking with his Captain from the firehouse, Captain Beatty says, “[Firemen] were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me” (Bradbury 56). Here the reader learns for the first time about the theoretical purpose of what Montag does for a living. Bradbury sets two primary characters against each other and portrays to the audience that each has good intentions, but it is up to the reader to decide which intentions are better. For Beatty, the purpose of censorship is to keep people from feeling anything upsetting.
For example, Beatty explains how the entire process of censorship in the form of book burning began. It started as a peace-keeping process that evolved into an exaggeration. Beatty recalls how it all started and tells Montag, “Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag” (Bradbury 57). For Beatty, if any one person is upset by something someone else has written, illustrated, or expressed in any form of media, it has to be done away with. Because the purpose of censoring nearly everything is to keep people from getting upset, Bradbury’s world needs something that is seen as pure and beautiful to erase the ugly nature of intellect. Therefore, fire is used as the solution to everything and homes are built with incinerators in the kitchen – the very place of creation and creativity in the home (Smolla, 2009). As a fireman, Montag is expected to understand this concept. For Montag, though, the ability to read books and explore their meaning is more valuable than avoiding upsetting feelings, so he sets himself against the notion of censorship.
Throughout his novel, Bradbury gives powerful examples of what censorship means to various types of people. To Beatty, the censorship of book burning is about keeping the peace in society. For Montag, it is an evil that has stripped Montag of the ability to learn and satisfy the innate curiosity that has been suppressed in him. In line with Montag, Professor Faber suffers greatly, as well. According to Faber, books are so hated because, “They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless” (Bradbury 79). Thanks to the way the world has evolved through censorship, people are afraid of anything that seems to have a pulse or life. One such person who prefers censorship is Montag’s dear wife.
Several times throughout the novel Bradbury portrays Montag’s wife, Mildred, as a sad victim of censorship. She succumbs to passive suicide and a shallow life of preferring television characters to her own husband’s company. This is never more evident than when Mildred finds the book under Montag’s pillow and reacts as though it is a lethal weapon or illicit drug (Bradbury 53). Instead of wanting to understand her husband or help him in his endeavor, she reacts in absolute distaste and wants to get Montag caught for his possession (Bradbury 53). In this scene, Bradbury illustrates how censorship has transformed free thought and the bond between a married couple into something unrecognizable – all because of the powerful message of rampant censorship that has been hammered into the minds of the people in Montag’s world. When Montag reveals his stash to his wife, “Mildred backed away as if she were suddenly confronted by a pack of mice that had come up out of the floor. He could hear her breathing rapidly and her face was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide…. She ran forward, seized a book and ran toward the kitchen incinerator” (Bradbury 63). As Bradbury conveys Mildred’s intense reaction, he is defining the severity of the censorship dogma and how it has taken over the average person’s will.
However, despite the fact that the people closest to him prefer censorship, Bradbury sets Montag against the world by illuminating his enduring fascination with why books were created. In the beginning stages of his personal revolution, Montag realizes that, “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over” (Bradbury 49). It is this realization of the devastation of what his job actually means for the world that causes Montag to resolve himself to trying to get his hands on as many books as possible and fighting his own internal battle of intellectualism versus censorship.
Censorship Versus Intelligence
Bradbury portrays two types of people in his novel. The first is the class of people who have read or seek to read books. This includes Montag, Beatty, Clarisse, and Faber. Beatty, though the antagonist, has read many novels and can quote them off hand. However, he uses his knowledge to dissuade others from wanting to read books. In fact, Beatty would rather the world be filled with the second class of people. The second class of people includes those who are numb, mindless, and drone-like. These people are those who go along with the hollow rules of Bradbury’s dystopia. Indeed, Beatty believes that, “…the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar” (Bradbury 55). Here Bradbury exemplifies how censorship is attacking human intellectualism and individuality. Beatty tries to convince Montag that books are no good and one should give up any aspiration of broadening one’s intellect.
Bradbury explains how censorship caused the devolution of literature and intellectualism through Beatty.
Beatty begins by explaining how things were in the nineteenth century, when everything was in “slow motion” (Bradbury 52). But the world wanted things to be faster, so the result was, “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-line dictionary resume” (Bradbury 52). The purpose of condensing everything transformed from a societal thirst for knowledge to a thirst for things to talk about with friends (Bradbury 52). As priorities shifted from intelligence to socialization, intellectualism was seen to be nothing more than “time-wasting thought” (Bradbury 52). Censorship caused literature and written communication to be dumbed down to something that the lay-person could understand and discuss at social gatherings. The priority was taken away from intellectualism and placed on being able to be social and relate to …show more content…
neighbors.
Bradbury communicates the breadth and devastation of censorship largely through Beatty’s dialogue. According to Brown, Beatty is the primary target of censorship (56). Because Beatty has read many of the censored works and is privy to the history of how censorship took over the world, he is simultaneously the antagonist as well as a victim of that which he promotes through his work as a fireman. Indeed, Beatty himself demonstrates that he, too, has suffered the effects of censorship by describing to Montag how the ban on books came to be. Beatty recalls the tone of society saying, “Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive” (Bradbury 55). According to Beatty and to researcher Smolla (898) it was the people, not the government, who enacted widespread censorship. The priorities of the public shifted and the government simply further encouraged the disdain for intellectualism by persecuting anyone who tried to save intellectualism. According to Hamblen, the reader should not be surprised that Montag will eventually fail and be caught because Beatty describes the fall of the written word by explaining how the media took over and gradually became truncated. In this way, Beatty is foreshadowing Montag’s demise (Hamblen 818). Montag was destined to fail, just like intellectualism.
Bradbury’s professor character, Faber, represents intellectualism. When Faber and Montag are first getting to know each other, Faber recalls when he first noticed that intellectualism was dying thanks to censorship. Faber tells Montag, “That was the year I came to class at the start of the new semester and found only one student to sign up for Drama from Aeschylus to O’Neill. You see? How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths” (Bradbury 85). The purpose of higher education was to train new generations of intellectuals. But censorship put an end to higher education and therefore no new intellectuals were entering the world to stand up for the works that were being destroyed. In the same way, as education was done away with, so was leisure time, which Faber states is when people contemplate the world and their experiences, and grow intellectually. Faber explains to Montag the distinction between leisure time now and what it used to be by saying, “If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall television… [The television] tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’” (Bradbury 80). When people usually sat around and contemplated the world – like Clarisse’s family often did – now people have replaced this time with virtual distractions or reckless hobbies. Faber’s experience with censorship is the personification of the death of intellectualism.
Censorship Versus Humanity
Montag’s world is full of robotic creatures and artificial life.
For example, the mechanical hound and Mildred’s “family” are commonplace creatures, even though they have no essence of humanity. However, due to widespread censorship, the lack of humanity has spread like a disease to infect humans as well. When Mildred and Montag are discussing a tragic case of suicide, Mildred shows her inhumanity when she says, “She’s nothing to me; she shouldn’t have had books. It was her responsibility, she should’ve thought of that. I hate her. She’s got you going and next thing you know we’ll be out, no house, no job, nothing” (Bradbury 48). Censorship has muted the feelings – compassion, sympathy, empathy – that humans are supposed to feel for one another. This sentiment is echoed by Mrs. Phelps who describes her marriage as nothing more than an acquaintanceship: “Anyway, Pete and I always said, no tears, nothing like that. It’s our third marriage each and we’re independent. Be independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don’t cry, but get married again, and don’t think of me” (Bradbury 91). Because censorship has stripped people of their emotions and humanity, they cannot even know what it means to be devoted to someone and to care when they have
died.
Captain Beatty is often portrayed as the voice of reason in Bradbury’s novel. However, he is the voice of reason for the enemy. As such, Beatty’s perspective on human individuality is the epitome of what censorship has done to humanity. Beatty says that, “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal” (Bradbury 55). Rather than celebrating individual differences, the new censored world wants everyone to be the same and therefore manageable. Even more so, Beatty asserts that, “Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes ager a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the county. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything” (Bradbury 57). Not only has censorship silenced intellectualism and humanity, but it has silenced human rituals and sentimentality. Bradbury uses Beatty’s hard persona to emphasize the point that it there is no emotion or cause to remember people who have been loved and lost, than there is no point of living.
The Tragic Result of Censorship
Montag begins his novel by describing one of the activists of censorship, Montag. However, as the novel progresses, we see Montag change into a protector of the things he once destroyed, and become a victim of censorship himself (McGiveron 177). This evolution of Montag’s persona is emulated in symbols of censorship throughout the novel. According to Zipes, the heroes of Bradbury’s novel are symbols of the books themselves (183). Therefore, when the books are being censored and burned, so too are the main characters. Nearly every single image in Bradbury’s novel is either a catalyst for censorship (the metallic hound, kerosene, fire, the household incinerator) or a victim of censorship (the characters, books, newspapers, universities). The transformative process comes to the forefront when Montag realizes that he and his wife are doomed if they stay on the same path of succumbing to censorship. Early on, Montag tells his wife, “We’ve got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we’re in such a mess, you and the medicine nights, and the car, and me and my work. We’re heading right for the cliff, Millie” (Bradbury 63). Without everything that has been censored, without freedom, everyone wants to kill themselves and does so passively.
Montag suffers several tragedies throughout Bradbury’s novel. In particular, he sees his wife passively killing herself. As he tries to convince her of the detrimental situation the world is in, he tells her, “You want to see that snake? It’s at Emergency Hospital where they filed a report on all the junk that snake got out of you! Would you like to go and check their file? Maybe you’d look under Guy Montag or maybe under Fear or War” (Bradbury 69). Censorship has transformed life for everyone in Montag’s world into one of fear and constant war with bomber jets flying overhead and nuclear warheads being launched off at other countries. Montag realizes that it is not the war that he needs to fear, but the censorship that is draining the life from everyone. Montag recalls all the people that have been lost in such a short time when he says, “My wife’s dying. A friend of mine’s already dead. Someone who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago” (Bradbury 77). Even though censorship was meant to keep people from getting upset, it has resulted in people killing themselves or being killed. In this way, censorship has been a complete failure.
Throughout his novel, Bradbury depicts many examples of censorship and the way in which censorship affects the characters. The rampant tone of censorship in Fahrenheit 451 causes great suffering, diminished intelligence, diminished humanity, and even numerous tragic deaths. Bradbury uses the dialogue between characters and interpersonal situations to explain the purpose, meaning, and detrimental effects of censorship. In doing so, Bradbury’s tone is conveyed consistently throughout his work and the reader is left with a powerful impression of Bradbury’s intention.
I.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012. Print.
Brown, Joseph F. “As the Constitution Says: Distinguishing Documents in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” The Explicator, 67.1 (2008): 55-9.
Connor, George E. “Spelunking with Ray Bradbury: the Allegory of the Cave in Fahrenheit 451.” Extrapolation, 45.4 (2004), 408-18.
Hamblen, Charles F. “Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in the Classroom.” The English Journal, 57.6 (1968): 818-24.
McGiveron, Rafeeq O. “Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” The Explicator, 54.3 (1996): 177-80.
Seed, David. “The Flight from the Good Life: ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in the Context of Postwar American Dystopias.” Journal of American Studies, 28.2 (1994): 225-40.
Smolla, Rodney A. “The Life of the Mind and a Life of Meaning: Reflections on Fahrenheit 451.” Michigan Law Review, 107 (2009): 895-912.
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