Fahrenheit 451* ignited a fire in 1953,
and it’s been blazing ever since. I have a love-hate relationship with this
novel. On the one hand, it affirms what I believe about the power of reading;
as Bradbury writes, “A book is a loaded gun…who knows who might be the target
of a well-read man” (Bradbury, 58). On the other hand, I’m not always crazy
about Bradbury’s style.
Unlike 1984, Fahrenheit 451 shows us a world in which ignorance is willfully
chosen and maintained by the people. The government doesn’t forcefully strip
the people of their knowledge and autonomy; instead, they simply help preserve
what the masses want: pure, unencumbered bliss. Happiness is the ultimate goal,
which here entails dumbing of the mind and titillation of the senses. You can’t
be cheery 24/7 if you’re philosophizing about your own mortality. Books have
the potential to bring about awareness that “all isn’t well in the world” (Bradbury, 104). The people prefer to
remain oblivious to anything that could upset them, so learning becomes
obsolete.
I love that
Bradbury chooses this route—I feel that it’s more realistic and more terrifying
to see people dig their own graves. We know oppressive governments exist, and
we see that censorship is alive and well in many countries. It’s easy to be
enraged by that—there are people you can point to and parties to blame. In my
opinion, a diffuse disregard for knowledge is more worrisome—it’s harder to
spot and more difficult to quench.
Bradbury
writes in the McCarthy Era, so his concerns stem from both the political and
technological climate of his time. Thus, he comes across as strikingly
anti-technology—the citizens of Fahrenheit
451 are glued to the modern day equivalent of a TV. The television “cram[s]
them full of noncombustible data”—all facts and no substance (Bradbury, 61).
I’m biased towards books, and I think that overall, books are more capable
vehicles for knowledge. It’s easier to
turn off your brain and consume via a medium that does all the work for you. But
there are crap books just like there are crap TV shows. I get the impression
that Bradbury hyperbolizes the downside of technology; I grant his point that
television can displace intellect,
but I don’t believe that’s always the case.
That’s not my only issue with Bradbury.
This work reminds me of Huxley’s Brave New World—both authors have an incredibly groundbreaking
idea, but they make mistakes plot-wise. Huxley fails to create remarkable
characters and hardly anything interesting happens. Bradbury crafts richly
complex characters, but then ramps the narrative up to such a fast pace that he
skims over their potential development. The main character—Guy
Montag—unquestioningly lives in the status quo one second and then suddenly
feels the burn the next. I craved less action and more in depth insight into characters’
history, motives, relationships, etc.
Additionally, dystopian novels are
especially vulnerable to a pitfall that’s a personal pet peeve: overly telegraphic
dialogue. Dialogue is effective when it advances plot, but it falls flat when
characters tell each other what they should presumably already know. For
example, I’m suspect of conversations that outline in detail how society and government
is structured. When two adults tell each other obvious facts about their own
country, I start to think this is a lazy
way of showing the reader how their world is organized. It’d be like having
one American say to another “Well, you know, we’re currently under the Obama
administration and the next election will be in November 2016. Donald Trump is
the Republican nominee and that’s caused quite a bit of controversy.” Well, no
duh. This isn’t news to the other individual unless they’ve been living under a
rock, so you get the unsettled feeling that it’s just for the reader’s benefit,
which isn’t realistic.
I don’t mean to hate too hard on
Bradbury. He has mastered a good metaphor and his fire motif is lit. Most
importantly, he pioneered meaningful discussions on intellectual freedom and how
knowledge-seeking behaviors shape us as individuals and citizens of the world. He
shows us how the basic desire to learn is linked to the ability to connect and
empathize with others, and he illustrates the lifeless horrors that can occur
when that desire stagnates. The firemen in the story burn to churn; they keep
the wheels rolling on society, but no one’s going anywhere. Bradbury’s work isn’t
a straightforward, apocalyptic prediction; rather, he hopes to prevent us from
becoming an illiterate people so steeped in mindless media that we don’t see
the problem. His work has been a critical reminder to us for over sixty years,
but his impressive prescience is counteracted by the aforementioned narrative drawbacks.
So, Fahrenheit 451 gets 3 out of 5
camel humps.
*Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit
451. New York: Del Rey Books, 1953. Print.
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