LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Bryan Lestarjette

Bradbury's Farenheit 451

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 describes a future America in which

firemen start fires rather than put them out. Their goal: to eliminate

all books not solely for entertainment. Censorship driven by

"technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure" has molded a

society completely out-of-touch with what's really going on in the

world. The government does whatever it wants (while giving the people

bread and circuses), and the country is engaged in a global war most

of its citizens are totally unaware of. In the end, this society is

shattered by a nuclear holocaust most of them never saw coming.

The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman who comes to question and

eventually reject his trade, choosing instead an attempt to keep

Western literature from going to ashes.

Towards the beginning of Montag's slow conversion, his boss, Fire

Chief Beatty, senses Montag's confusion and seeks to clarify and

justify how the burning of books came to be:

"Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow

motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. 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."

…

"Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we?

Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of

the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs,

Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes,

Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon

or Mexico…. 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. And the

three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no

declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass

exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are

allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."

…

"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the

Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of

every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make

them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in

the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach

man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"

Question 1. Is American society today moving in the direction

described in Fahrenheit 451?

Question 2. Is censorship an acceptable tool to mold society with?

Question 3. Are Bradbury's ideas about political correctness and its

influence on society correct or too simplistic?