Fahrenheit 451, dystopian novel, first published in 1953, that is regarded as perhaps the greatest work by American author Ray Bradbury and has been praised for its stance against censorship and its defense of literature as necessary both to the humanity of individuals and to civilization.

In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. It later won the Prometheus “Hall of Fame” Award in 1984 and a “Retro” Hugo Award in 2004. Bradbury was honoured with a Spoken WordGrammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version.

Summary

This is a story about a man named Guy Montag who is a fireman.  However, by today’s standards, he is not a fireman. Rather than putting out fires, he starts them by burning books, which are outlawed by the government.

After talking to his neighbour, Clarisse, Guy begins to doubt his work. When he looks around, he sees a wife who doesn’t love him and a world wrapped in technology and war. Every day, people kill each other and  no one seems to care.

After learning that Clarisse died, Guy further begins to question himself whether or not he is doing the right thing by burning books. He is so enraged that he steals a book before burning a lady and a pile of books.

Beatty, his fire captain, notices changes in Guy and keeps a close eye on him. Guy tells his wife that he has a small book collection at home, and they try to read them together, but his wife seems disinterested.

Guy meets Faber, an old English professor, and the two decide to fight the government together.

Meanwhile, when Guy is at work, they receive a notification that books have been found. Surprisingly, the firemen arrive at Guy’s residence.

Guy is forced to burn all of his books with a flamethrower, but when provoked, he kills Beatty. He grabs what books he can and rushes over to Faber’s house for a final farewell. 

The government has launched a full-fledged broadcast hunt for Guy, which includes the use of a mechanical search dog. Guy escapes the city and walks down the river, where he encounters a group of runaways. There, he discovers that they have all memorized books, thus creating a human library of literature.

Finally, the runaways watch the city being destroyed by enemy bombs and prepare themselves for a grim future.

Analysis

So, why does this society dislike books? What did books ever do to humans?  In this society, people have chosen not to read books. The majority of people quit reading and instead found entertainment in the form of bite-sized  portions of educational information. 

The administration then decided that books should be forbidden because they contained contradictory views that caused debates and conflicts. Rather than creating a marketplace of ideas, the government wanted to streamline thinking so that everyone had the same viewpoint. What’s even scarier is that this doesn’t seem too farfetched to occur in real life.

Most importantly, this story tries to answer the question: Why are books so important?  As Faber discusses with Guy, books are important for three reasons.  The first is that books are excellent sources of information. The second reason is that reading books takes time and dedication. The third reason is that we have the power to react to our surroundings based on what we learn from reading. That the words in books aren’t just meaningless words, but have practical applications in our lives.

It’s not just because this old dead guy wrote some things for me to read hundreds of years later, but also because how do those words apply to our society today? 

Despite the fact that technology has progressed our society, we still tent to see the same human problems as in the past, so it seems that technology makes our life simpler but does not solve many of our most basic problems, such as war, disease, and poverty.

It’s quite scary to think that the author may have imagined some of the technology that we use presently. Fast cars, mechanical dogs, large TV screens, reality TV, bluetooth, and a variety of other technologies are included in the novel. It makes you question how far we are from a world without books.