Fahrenheit 451 Symbols

In the novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes of character Guy Montag who lives in a time where society has the belief that reading books is wrong. A society where Montag’s job is to burn these forbidden books, to rid them from the people. That’s all well until Clarisse, his young neighbor, makes him question why things are the way they are. She makes him question everything, even his marriage with Mildred, and his captain, Baety, who demand that books all be burned. In all of this confusion Montag finds Faber, an elderly man possessing a love for books who pushes Montag to question and seek answers to his wondering mind. Bradbury uses symbols throughout the novel to point out society’s many corruptions and faults. In a society where books are burned, and a mindless man is the government’s goal, their two greatest weapons are disguised as what seems like harmless technology. Bradbury uses the seashells within the novel as a symbol to represent the depth and importance the government places on the effects of propaganda. As Montag comes home from work he notices just how effective these seashells of propaganda truly are when he sees “His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steal, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty...There had been no night in two years that MIldred had not swam that sea...” (12). Through the dependency Mildred has on the seashells Bradbury shows how easily the government makes it’s citizens numb and mindless, thus exposing the corrupt society. Bradbury uses the parlor family as another symbol to represent superficiality. This is an example of another tactic the government utilizes to create a society of mindless men. The parlor families would replace reality with pleasure so well that Montag felt as if Mildred and he were being driven apart “Well, wasn’t there a wall between him and Mildred, when you came down to it? Literally not just one wall but, so far, three! And expensive too!” (44). The parlor family, made up of walls of televisions, draws in it’s audience and transforms them into superficial mindless beings, causing a great distance in relationships. The viewers become so entranced or “wrapped up” in the programing that reality looses importance, filling the citizens minds with the ideals of the government rather than their own thoughts.

In addition to creating a mindless society by use of technology, Bradbury shows through another symbol how the government takes care of the more difficult cases.
The mechanical hound, a robotic dog of doom, is another one of the many symbols Bradbury created and used throughout the novel. He uses the hound as a symbol of dictatorship, used by the government to enforce their policies. Bradbury depicts this in a metaphor where he displays the firemen as they watch the hound after they have “...set the ticking combination of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse areaway, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats...The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat or chicken caught half across the areaway...” (25). Bradbury uses the mechanical hound to represent the government, and the animals to display the citizens. With his metaphor Bradbury shows how the hound attacks in the name of dictatorship, as to fulfill the wishes of the government, or in this metaphor, the firemen. Throughout the novel the phoenix is mentioned and used by Bradbury to be a symbol of the society itself. He makes a direct comparison to this when Montag’s new friend Granger, an out cast to society because of his love of books, makes a reference to the creation as the two watch as their old town goes up in smoke “ ‘He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did’ ” (163). Throughout Granger’s discussion with Montag about the phoenix, Bradbury is trying to show how “silly” man is for destroying, recreating, and suffering the same fate as the time before when man has the access to learn from their mistakes done before them. Bradbury shows this all through the symbol of the phoenix. He even draws the attention of the reader to the symbol of the phoenix placed on the firefighter’s jackets and hats, depicting how the firefighters themselves are a part of the cycle of the phoenix. The phoenix was not the only thing that Bradbury had as a symbol that was related to fire. Bradbury uses the constant symbol of actual fire with a double meaning throughout the novel. Fire is used all through the novel to burn things, a tool for destruction Montag, being a firemen, knows the evil of the fire first hand, especially when he had to burn his own home “ ‘Fire!’ A great nuzzling gout of fire leapt out to lap at the books and knock them against the wall. He stepped into the bedroom and fired twice and the twin beds went up in a great simmering whisper, with more heat and passion and light than he would have supposed them to contain. he burnt...” (116). Bradbury shows the evil in fire through Montag destroying, with the use of fire. Along with the evil fire does, it does some good. Bradbury shows fire’s good side when Montag stumbles upon a group of people in the distance “That small motion, the white and red color, a stranger fire because it meant a different thing to him. It was not burning. It was warming” (145). Bradbury creates an emotion of shock to this newly found positive aspect to the fire. He does this to show how the government successfully masked the good of fire with the bad. With the use of symbols, Bradbury depicts the corruptions and faults of Fahrenheit 451’s society. He uses common technology used in the society to point out the mindless men the government has successfully created. Through the use of the mechanical hound, Bradbury creates the symbol of dictatorship. To point out the reoccurring stupidity of the society, he uses the phoenix. Also, Bradbury shows how one can be burned and warmed by the fire throughout the book as one of his greatest symbols. All of these individual symbols were thoughtfully placed throughout the writing but, perhaps the greatest symbol that Bradbury created and used was not within the novel, but the novel itself.