Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
The author:
Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan (
Illinois) on 22nd of August 1920. This city was later also described in his stories under the name "Green Town". At the age of 14 years he moved to Arizona and later to Los Angeles where he finally finished school. His parents, who were book publishers, and his aunt Neva, a fan of fairytales, influenced Bradbury very much. As a child he liked comics, horrorfilms and fantasy worlds. In 1934 he started writing short stories which mostly trade with science fiction, and published them in youth magazines or science-fiction-magazines.
By writing stories and even selling newspapers he earned a little money; in 1947 he published his first book called "Dark Carnival", an anthology of his short stories. He finally made the breakthrough as a highly acclaimed author with "The Martian Chronicles", later he wrote works like "The
Illustrated Man" and "Fahrenheit 451" and he got prices like the "Benjamin Franklin Award" or the "National Institute of Arts and letters Award in Lierature". An interesting fact concerning the success of his books is that "The Illustrated Man" has been a highly praised work, whereas "Fahrenheit 451", his most famous book, was judged as a story beneath contempt (by reviewers) because of the missing description of for instance the political system, the very optimistic
ending and the simpleminded plot.
The characters:
Guy Montag: He's the protagonist of the story. At the beginning he seems to be a "normal", dissatisfied and bored average chap. He earns his money by burning books .
.. he's a fireman in a narrow-minded, partly dictatorial system. When he meets Clairisse, his character changes: he acquires
self-knowledge, he undergoes a process of development, goes through a phase of guilt and despair and gets to know the other side of books and knowledge. By reading stories he starts to think and so there arises a dilemma between his job and his new attitude: both are inconsistent with each other. He makes up his mind, decides to fight for intellectual liberty, he undergoes a change and is reborn as a new "Phoenix".
Mildred: She's Guy's wife but has a totally different character. She's the typical member of society, she fits into the system very well, is only interested in money and
material possession and represents shallowness and mediocrity. Mildred, an artificial and obviously isolated beauty, loves fun, which means e.g. watching TV, and because of her addiction to electricity, technology and the "modern way of life" she in't even able to communicate. She doesn't show any emotions and she also betrays her husband in the end.
Clairisse: She's the 17-year-old neighbour of Guy Montag and influences him very much. She's the exact opposite of Mildred: She's an outsider, she's everything but an average chap, she's even a living time bomb for society for various reasons. She's open-minded, she is able to think, she has her own opinion. She doesn't mince maters as regards unusual or even dangerous questions. She's quite a human and curios peson who's raring to do something.
Beatty: He's the boss of Montag, his antagonist and quite an impenetrable person.
He's ruthless, cold-blooded, very
authoritarian and seems to be very brainy. On the one hand he's backing the state's opinion up to the hilt, on the other hand he's well educated and he often quotes famous authors (which indicates that he could have read books, too). In the end he overdoes it with his accusations and manipulates Montag into killing him.
Granger: He's a foil of Beatty but not as authoritarian as this chief. Granger also tries to bring intellectual light into the "Dark Age" he lives in.
Faber: He's an ancient professor, loves philosophy and science and so he represents humanism and the integrity of an individual.
He's quite well informed and of course well read, he knows really a lot about the past but also has a negative side: He's more than careful, he's a real coward, but in the end he gets more courageous.
The plot/interpretation:
Guy Montag, a fireman of the future, lives in a modern, strange and scary world where students don't learn from humans, but from TV (and so they can't ask questions), where people get rid of their aggressions by visiting "Fun Parks" and "Car Wreckers", and where human beings try to have fun by killing others. The motive of having fun is a very important one in the book, as it is in some other science-fiction-novels. The most important aim of humans is having fun - even by taking pills, which might be suggestive of drugs you take today to feel better or to forget your problems. In this future world everything is horribly modern and reminds one of simple problems of the life of today. For instance, Bradbury criticizes that people don't have their own opinion any more, that they abuse technology and so on by the symbol of the wall-to-wall-circuit, a big TV-set people (especially Mildred) (ab-)use every day or by the fact that people only (are allowed to) read comic-strips or sex-magazines.
In this depressing world where people can't even talk to each other, Montag's job to find books and to burn them. At the very beginning of the first chapter (the book is divided in 3 sections; the first one goes by the beautiful name of "It's pleasure to burn") Ray Bradbury describes the job and the feelings of firemen doing their job ("It was special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed").
One fine day, the protagonist gets to know his new neighbour, Clairisse McClellan, a young and critical girl who prompts him to start thinking about his meaningless life and books. The (short) acquaintance with Clairisse who soon is killed in an accident (?) influences Guy very much, he has problems with his feelings and even wants to take the beetle to get rid of his aggressions and kill animals but finally he comes under the books' spellbound.
The next incisive event in Montag's life is a meeting with an old woman who prefers dying in a sea of flames to "living" without her beloved books. Montag gets the order to burn books in the house of an old and withdrawn woman who refuses to leave her home while the firemen burn her books.
This event made quite a big impression on Montag who also steals a book from the lady. Montag reads the book surreptitiously unaffected by warnings of his boss, Beatty, who apparently knows that Montag does own a book. The only problem Guy has while reading the book is that he can't remember the plot (title of the 2nd chapter: "The sieve and the sand").
Later he gets to know some of Mildred's friends, Mrs Phelps and Mrs Bowles, who characterize the attitude of citizens concerning for example their relationship to their husbands ("He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don't cry, […] but don't think of me").
The third important incident is Montag's acquaintance to Faber, a very well educated and intelligent ancient professor who encourages him in his assumption that reading books is important for everyone. Faber wants Montag to find out what is the truth and to make his own decision.
At the end of the 2nd chapter Beatty just tries to convince Guy that reading is a scourge and that everyone has to obey and accept the political system when there's another alarm; they jump into the car and drive to - the house of Guy Montag. There Beatty gives Montag a roasting , provokes him very much and in a way wants Guy to kill him and so Montag does; he burns his boss.
Montag is totally confused and bewildered, he nearly gets knocked down by a car (the car doesn't drive over Montag who lies on the road for fear of having damaged a car, which is significant of this society, too), meets Beatty who tells him to pour alcohol over his body so that he can't be caught by the mechanical hound, gives him new clothes and tells him the way to a hidden place. Montag follows Faber's instructions and finally arrives at a place where some bums ("living books") live, they tell him about their world view and the fact that everyone of them knows the plot of one book very well. Montag decides to be a Book of Ecclesiastes and also sees an interesting example for the propaganda of the politics on TV: A scene's shown where another, innocent and harmless Montag is killed by the police.
The predicted and dreaded atomic war starts, and an interesting scene is described: A bomb detonates in the town where Mildred, who apparently betrayed her husband and left him, lives, and so the TV-set breaks down .
.. Mildred sees her empty and unreal smile on the black TV-screen and of course she's shocked.
The ending of the book is quite a strange and philosophic.
"And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."
Apart from the already treated motives and symbols I'd like to talk about some more of them.
For example, Bradbury talks about very big and long billboards, which also existed when he wrote his book, but of course haven't been that big. He writes that people hardly go by foot, and so he describes the dangers in the streets because of fast cars . When he talks about the mechanical hound, Bradbury wants to allude to the new methods of the police (today it could be e.g. computer search).
All in all I think Ray Bradbury wants to lance appeal to his readers not to believe politics etc.
in blind faith, not to abuse the technical development and to acquire knowledge.
Personal comment:
I liked "Fahrenheit 451" quite a lot, it's written in an interesting way; sometimes the style is straightforward, sometimes it's rather philosophic. I understood it really well, also because of the vocabulary in the book, and what is very unusual for me: Once I even read more than we had to, which is really a big compliment to the book and its author.
+: Beinhaltet eine Biografie des Autors, eine Analyse der wichtigsten Charaktere und eine gute Interpretation.
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