Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury is the second incarnation of HG Wells. Most of Wells’ books were a social commentary of some kind (I don’t like British imperialism, so how would they like it if Martians imperialized them? What would happen to our current class structure over 800,000 years? Etc.). Fahrenheit 451 is a commentary on censorship and the amount of reading people do these days.
The book is the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman. It is his job to start fires. He starts books on fire, because books are banned. The reason for banning books is that the smart people made the dumb people feel dumb, so they banned the books, burned as many as they could, and now they have firemen whose job it is to burn down the houses of people who are hiding books. The result is a world where people essentially watch TV all day every day. Montag’s wife Mildred spends most of her time in their parlor, where TV’s fill up three of the four walls. On these TV’s are her “families,” it sounds like they are just soap operas that she watches all day that she can interact with in really small ways (they had a chip installed that makes the characters say “Mrs. Montag” instead of “Paying customer” whenever they are talking to her. It makes her even more involved with it). These parlors with TV’s covering the walls are very common in this world. One woman, when discusses having children says that “having children is like doing laundry! You just throw them in the parlor and give them some clean clothes every now and then!” This may not sound realistic, but I believe it does happen on occasion in our society. I lived with a guy who weighed over 300 pounds, and the reason was that he sat on the couch for thirteen hours every day watching TV. He also had the personality of a little kid, which is another characteristic of the people living in Fahrenheit 451: they don’t really get what is real and what is not. They don’t thing the characters in books could be real because they can’t see them, but the people on their walls are real because they see and “interact” with them.
So why do we care about Montag so much? Early on in the book, he meets a girl named Clarisse, who basically introduces him to the world. She asks all the silly questions, and just observes people. Eventually she dies, or something. I don’t really know. I wish Bradbury had explained what happened to her or had her come back at the end. In Montag’s hero’s journey, she serves as the mentor, which is the character that sends our hero on (in this case) his quest. Montag’s quest is to stop “killing” authors by burning their works. After he burns down a house, he realizes that every time he burns a book, he is killing the author in a small way. He makes that connection when he burns down a house that has a woman still inside it. It horrifies him so much that he begins to wonder what is in the books that is worth dying for. Long story short, he finds that books are wonderful, except when they are banned and get his house burned down.
Montag’s discovery of books leads him to betray his fireman friends, and he is eventually exiled from society because of his bookish ways. Lucky for him, right after he leaves the city, there is a huge (and short) war that annihilates the city he just lived in. The hobo’s he ends up with are all book nerds, and they have developed a way to recollect any book they have read at least once. They are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They preserved all the books between all the hobo’s in the country. Montag is the book of Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
Bradbury probably chose the book of Ecclesiastes to be ironic, because the book is about how work is meaningless, although having wisdom is the best way to live. For example, chapter 1 verse 2 states:

2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

This ties in with the end of Fahrenheit 451 when the literature nerds were saying that humans will always go through repeated Dark Ages and Renaissance’s, and their job is to preserve the wisdom that the books have. Also in chapter 1, (verse 18):

18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

This is passage is true for Montag and the other nerds because they are sorrowful for the civilization that is lost at the end of the book, whereas all the people living in it were indifferent because they had lost touch with what was real and what was just on their TV. Next week I’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s opinions of TV in a review of Timequake.
Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0345342968