Plot Summary
Guy Montag is a fireman. A fireman who is paid to set fire to books. In Fahrenheit 451's futuristic world, there is no need for firefighters since all buildings are fireproof. Instead, firemen are employed to enforce the censorship of books. A long list of censored books now includes all works of fiction, philosophy, religion, ideology... you get the picture. A list is posted in each firehouse and firemen wait for alarms. When the alarm goes off, the firemen rush to the address, expose the hidden forbidden books and set fire to them and the house they are found in. The owner is arrested and immediately disappears; but many choose to stay behind and be burned with their books. And the firemen graciously oblige them.
This is Guy Montag's job. He works twelve hour shifts at the firehouse. He plays poker with his fellow firemen while they wait for an alarm.
At home, his wife is occupied with the drama that is broadcast over the walls (giant television screens that occupy full walls--the Montag living room has three and Mrs. Montag wants a fourth, although they can't afford one quite yet on Montag's $6000 yearly salary.) The dramas they broadcast seem to be interactive reality-based shows. The viewer can interact and engage in the drama interjecting his or her own opinions into whatever conflict is brewing between the people on the "walls." Each wall broadcasts one person's face, so having three walls gives you three people, four walls give you four people; and you can imagine how overpowering that would be to have larger-than-life people constantly yelling in your living room at full-volume. Mrs. Montag pretty much lives for these dramas, she calls the "wall people" her family and spends her whole days in the living room. She has friends over and they hang out in the living room with the family. She also has radio receivers plugged into her ears, so she can listen to music, commercials, and news (but not too much news, just two or three sentences of it between songs and commercials) all the time. They're even plugged in when she's sleeping, which is probably why she needs so many sleeping pills...
It seems like everyone is occupied with similar pursuits. If they're not sitting in the living room with their wall-families, they're out driving recklessly--another popular pastime. It seems that people in Fahrenheit 451 will do anything to avoid boredom or silence. And their society is more than happy to provide them with all kinds of distractions.
Maybe that's because the government doesn't want its people thinking. The government wants its cheerfully ignorant voters thoughtlessly absorbed in make-believe worlds so it can pursue its own agenda. Even now, the world is on the brink of nuclear war and nobody seems to care.
There's something about all this that seems vaguely disturbing to Guy Montag but he can't quite put his finger on it. He doesn't even realize that he finds it disturbing until he catches himself stealing censored books and hiding them in his ventilation ducts.
And then he meets a seventeen year old girl who seems very different from everyone else.
What I liked
Ray Bradbury's classic bestseller is startlingly prophetic. Facebook, iPods, Big Screen TVs, it's all in here. Kind of scary, considering it was written way back in the 1950s.
The book is very well written. The writing style is ... spartan. Bradbury says so much in so few words. It's actually intimidating. It's a very short book, but it's so deep. There's so much here that I could probably read it several more times and find many more things waiting to be unpacked.
The world of Fahrenheit 451 is rich with detail and very real. Bradbury certainly knew what he was doing when he wrote this. Reading this book, I could imagine myself in it, walking the streets of Guy Montag's city with its two-hundred foot billboards and its constant noise and entertainment and its firemen racing to the latest alarm aboard a salamander truck while its dissidents hid in their homes in fear, harbouring their books and their freethinking.
It's also a very imaginative novel. And, like I've said before, imagination always scores big points with me.
What I didn't like
Almost nothing.
The book was extremely boring at first, I'm embarrassed to admit. I was very tempted to give up on it entirely in the first fifty pages. But, it picked up. The ending was very exciting.
Conclusion (spoiler warning)
Ok, I really didn't see that nuclear holocaust coming at the end... and that was kind of frustrating because I kept trying to piece it together in my head with the previous events. But now that I think about it, my surprise at the nuclear holocaust kind of mirrors the surprise of the people in the novel. The people in the cities that were destroyed didn't see it coming, they died doing what they always did--entertaining themselves thoughtlessly. Meanwhile, it seems as though everyone outside the cities, the dissident freethinkers who had fled civilization and lived as vagrant fugitives in the wilderness expected the nuclear holocaust, knew it was coming, and were prepared for it and prepared to help rebuild the world afterwards.
I give this book a rating of 5/5 flamethrowing firefighters and recommend it to anyone who has the patience to wade into a slowly unraveling story of a dystopian future. Just, beware the dark stuff, it can get kind of creepy.
Guy Montag is a fireman. A fireman who is paid to set fire to books. In Fahrenheit 451's futuristic world, there is no need for firefighters since all buildings are fireproof. Instead, firemen are employed to enforce the censorship of books. A long list of censored books now includes all works of fiction, philosophy, religion, ideology... you get the picture. A list is posted in each firehouse and firemen wait for alarms. When the alarm goes off, the firemen rush to the address, expose the hidden forbidden books and set fire to them and the house they are found in. The owner is arrested and immediately disappears; but many choose to stay behind and be burned with their books. And the firemen graciously oblige them.
This is Guy Montag's job. He works twelve hour shifts at the firehouse. He plays poker with his fellow firemen while they wait for an alarm.
At home, his wife is occupied with the drama that is broadcast over the walls (giant television screens that occupy full walls--the Montag living room has three and Mrs. Montag wants a fourth, although they can't afford one quite yet on Montag's $6000 yearly salary.) The dramas they broadcast seem to be interactive reality-based shows. The viewer can interact and engage in the drama interjecting his or her own opinions into whatever conflict is brewing between the people on the "walls." Each wall broadcasts one person's face, so having three walls gives you three people, four walls give you four people; and you can imagine how overpowering that would be to have larger-than-life people constantly yelling in your living room at full-volume. Mrs. Montag pretty much lives for these dramas, she calls the "wall people" her family and spends her whole days in the living room. She has friends over and they hang out in the living room with the family. She also has radio receivers plugged into her ears, so she can listen to music, commercials, and news (but not too much news, just two or three sentences of it between songs and commercials) all the time. They're even plugged in when she's sleeping, which is probably why she needs so many sleeping pills...
It seems like everyone is occupied with similar pursuits. If they're not sitting in the living room with their wall-families, they're out driving recklessly--another popular pastime. It seems that people in Fahrenheit 451 will do anything to avoid boredom or silence. And their society is more than happy to provide them with all kinds of distractions.
Maybe that's because the government doesn't want its people thinking. The government wants its cheerfully ignorant voters thoughtlessly absorbed in make-believe worlds so it can pursue its own agenda. Even now, the world is on the brink of nuclear war and nobody seems to care.
There's something about all this that seems vaguely disturbing to Guy Montag but he can't quite put his finger on it. He doesn't even realize that he finds it disturbing until he catches himself stealing censored books and hiding them in his ventilation ducts.
And then he meets a seventeen year old girl who seems very different from everyone else.
What I liked
Ray Bradbury's classic bestseller is startlingly prophetic. Facebook, iPods, Big Screen TVs, it's all in here. Kind of scary, considering it was written way back in the 1950s.
The book is very well written. The writing style is ... spartan. Bradbury says so much in so few words. It's actually intimidating. It's a very short book, but it's so deep. There's so much here that I could probably read it several more times and find many more things waiting to be unpacked.
The world of Fahrenheit 451 is rich with detail and very real. Bradbury certainly knew what he was doing when he wrote this. Reading this book, I could imagine myself in it, walking the streets of Guy Montag's city with its two-hundred foot billboards and its constant noise and entertainment and its firemen racing to the latest alarm aboard a salamander truck while its dissidents hid in their homes in fear, harbouring their books and their freethinking.
It's also a very imaginative novel. And, like I've said before, imagination always scores big points with me.
What I didn't like
Almost nothing.
The book was extremely boring at first, I'm embarrassed to admit. I was very tempted to give up on it entirely in the first fifty pages. But, it picked up. The ending was very exciting.
Conclusion (spoiler warning)
Ok, I really didn't see that nuclear holocaust coming at the end... and that was kind of frustrating because I kept trying to piece it together in my head with the previous events. But now that I think about it, my surprise at the nuclear holocaust kind of mirrors the surprise of the people in the novel. The people in the cities that were destroyed didn't see it coming, they died doing what they always did--entertaining themselves thoughtlessly. Meanwhile, it seems as though everyone outside the cities, the dissident freethinkers who had fled civilization and lived as vagrant fugitives in the wilderness expected the nuclear holocaust, knew it was coming, and were prepared for it and prepared to help rebuild the world afterwards.
I give this book a rating of 5/5 flamethrowing firefighters and recommend it to anyone who has the patience to wade into a slowly unraveling story of a dystopian future. Just, beware the dark stuff, it can get kind of creepy.
patrick, can i copy/print this for my students?
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