Essay on Fahrenheit 451

Christian Allen

Fahrenheit 451 Analysis
Are you controlled by your government? This is a question that you honestly must pontificate. I read this book and felt the strong underlying presence that people were poisoned by the government and its twisted ways. Author Ray Bradbury shows throughout the book “Fahrenheit 451” how this dystopian society is controlled by fear, the fire department, and mass media.

Bradbury shows how the government rules with an iron fist. Anyone to break the law is arrested and taken away. In the third section after Montag kills Beatty he is on the run from a mechanical hound and two dozen helicopters with great technological powers. He nearly gets hit by a teenage driver who thinks it is funny to barely escape the hound by floating down a river out of the city. Instead of the police showing him getting away they find an oddball person who is in the wrong place at the right time and say he is in fact Montag. The book reads, “The innocent man stood bewildered, a cigarette burning in his hand. He stared at the Hound, not knowing what it was. He probably never knew” (Bradburry 149). All the people watching the chase think it is him and see the hound reach him and proceed to rip the flesh off his bones. This is the epitome of the government trying to put fear into society and put down any thoughts of reading books. I believe the hound that each fire department uses is built only to keep the firemen in check and neutralize any thought of reading books that they may find on the job. This is one of the many ways in the book that the government controls.
The government has smaller groups to aid them in poisoning the minds of those who have the idea to read books, one of which being the fire department. Unlike a modern fire department they burn books and houses. In the first section Guy Montag arrives at a house that needs to be set ablaze. This was to be different than all the other burnings because the convicted person was not hauled away by the police department, instead she was ready to defend the books to the death. She was willing to die for what she believed in and this shocked Montag to his very core. “You weren’t hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since only things couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper…” (Bradbury 36). It was almost like the poison being driven away and him coming to his senses. All this time he had been passing the poison around like a virus killing all who stand in its path. Every cover of every chapter of every page burnt at fahrenheit 451. All this life taken away for what? Because the government has the fire department trained like a common house dog who will do whatever you say and never question why.

Another ruthless tool of control that the government employs is the glamorous and easily swayed mass media. If you were to compare our modern media to the dystopian media you would more than likely find startling similarities in both. For example when guy Montag sees Jesus endorsing a totally irrelevant product to who his figure you get the sense that if you are a follower of Jesus you should have this product. This is much like a beer commercial were everyone is partying and having a good time it creates this false sense of what you to will get if you purchase this product. After you can get people to believe in totally off topic items you can easily start to poison their minds. Bradbury does a great job predicting the future of mass media in things like the parlor walls which relate to plasma T.V. or the sea shells which resemble ear buds. The government uses these to create adds and shows showing people that reading is illegal and all who read will parish. In the third section of the book Bradbury creates the chase between the law and Montag to show how technology is poisoning the people. The telecaster of the radio spoke with vindication, “Police suggest entire population in Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The Fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house.” (Bradbury 138). This shows that people are so poisoned that at the sound of a few words from a telecaster they will rise to aid in something they do not understand.
This book by Ray Bradbury is masterfully crafted and almost surreal that he could predict the future and future pitfalls. I think if society is not careful we to could fall into a dystopian society like the one conjured in this book. That is why you need to step out of the box and question why do we live our lives and am I happy doing what I am doing? Bradbury writes this book with the firm presence that people can easily be manipulated but it is our jobs as people of funning society to differentiate between fact and fiction.