Fahrenheit 451 Analysis

The novel’s tagline explains the title “Fahrenheit 451 the temperature at which book papers catches fire and burns”. Montag who is the lead character is a fireman who becomes disillusioned with the duty of censoring works and destroying knowledge, finally quitting his job and joining a resistant group who memorize and share the worlds greatest literally and cultural works. Fahrenheit 451 has been a subject of interpretations focusing on the historical book burning role in suppressing dissenting ideas. This book presents an American society future which does not recognize the power of knowledge. The main players appears to be burning books which symbolizes destroying knowledge. The upside: I would have loved this book when I was in high school. Downside: I am reading the book thirteen years too late.

Ray Bradbury’s novel takes place in a not-so-distant future where all books have been banned and the owners o the printed materials are criminalized. It is the role of fireman in this future society to burn books and arrests any person in possession with one; however one such fireman named “Guy Montag” has moral awakening forces him to reevaluate his beliefs as well as his profession. As his character grows and develops over the course of the novel, Ray Bradbury moves the tale into wider philosophical implications and the novel culminates in an unexpected, dramatic finale. If you look more closely at the novel, noting the specifically the Biblical allusions and the literary, you will see a deeper message in it than simply the warning that our society is headed for intellectual stagnation (McGiveron, 366).

The biblical allusions point subtly toward a solution to help us out of our intellectual “dark age” while the literally allusions are used to underscore the emptiness of the twenty- fourth century. Bradbury tends to mean that the nature of life is cyclical and currently we are at the bottom of the intellectual cycle. We should then develop faith as well as blindly hope for an upward swing of the cycle. This natural cycle’s concept is largely explicitly stated by Bradbury through the character of Granger. While I find that some of people see little or no use for such old-fashioned attention to the text itself. Ray Bradbury’s novel is such an overtly didactic work that it almost invites such examination.

Surely even the stoutest reader-response critic would agree that Bradbury is trying to sell the readers that he has put into his novel. Yet there is a discrepancy between the ideas the author is selling and the readers are buying and the idea Ray Bradbury has let the whole rest of the support. My suggestion is that this is not necessarily to label it as a weakness but to indicate the book is just a little bit richer and most likely truer than many people have supposed. "Mass degradation of humanity and massive contradictions in Bradbury’s vision of America inFahrenheit 451" Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (2008): 3-18. McGiveron, Rafeeq O. "Ray Bradbury Unbound. " Extrapolation 57. Vellutino, Frank R.