Introduction

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous and popular novels ever
written that are of a literary genre known as dystopias. The term dystopia is derived from
Utopia, the word that Thomas More utilized for the title of his novel from the 16th century
portraying an ideal society. In any case, Platos Republic is generally considered to be the earliest
work of its type the 4th-century BC, which has in common with the government of Bradburys
novel a deep suspicion of literature as disturbing and subversive. Plato points out that if the great
epic poet Homer were to arrive in his ideal city, he should crown him with laurels, congratulate
him on his achievements, and send him on his waymuch less harsh than burning him to death,
but depicting a similar determination to control the thoughts of citizens and ban the free play of
the imagination.
The reason I chose this specific topic is the predictive parallel I would like to depict and which
Bradbury made in his novel, having both Utopia and Dystopia as indicators of societys status
quo.
The fact that stresses me the most as an intellectual and a social being is that before the age of
television people actually sat around chatting and enjoying each others company, which is
depicted as a fantasy in the book.
The paper depicts both sides of the medal, as well as the transition from Utopia to Dystopia in
the novel, as seen by Montag, the novel protagonist.
Although Bradbury has said that the book-burnings in Fahrenheit 451 were inspired by the 1933
Nazi book-burnings, he was much more likely inspired by the censorship that accompanied the
Red Scare of his own era.
The Red Scare (1950) period was most memorably exemplified by Senator Joseph McCarthys
vicious, irresponsible crusade against supposed communists and communist sympathizers which
included attempts to remove suspect books from public libraries. This was also the period of the
Hollywood blacklist, with many actors, directors, and screenwriters being banned from working
on Hollywood films or television.

The 1950 was the year that television became a truly mass-culture phenomenon in the United
States. People would visit friends simply to sit - or stand, if there werent enough chairs to go
around - and stare mesmerized at the glowing little box for hours. To some people it seemed to
portend the death of civilized discourse, literacy, and individualism. Among these was Ray
Bradbury.

Utopia and dystopia in Fahrenheit 451 and other great works of fiction
As we reflect on Fahrenheit 451 as a piece of dystopian fiction, a common definition for both
terms "dystopia" and "utopia" is required. Dystopia is often used as an antonym of "utopia," a
perfect world often imagined existing in the future. Therefore, dystopia is a terrible and
paradoxical place. Most commonly cited as the model of a twentieth-century dystopian novel is
Yevgeny Zamiatin's We (1924), which envisions an oppressive but stable social order
accomplished only through the complete effacement of the individual. We, which may more
properly be called an anti-utopian work rather than a dystopian work, is often cited as the
precursor of George Orwell's (his pen name) 1984 , a nightmarish vision of a totalitarian world
of the future, similar to one portrayed in We, in which terrorist force maintains order. Nineteen
Eighty-Four may be by far the best known dystopian novel is, written in 1948 and published in
June of 1949. We and 1984 are often cited as classic dystopian fictions, along with Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which, contrary to popular belief, has a somewhat different
purpose and object of attack than the previously mentioned novels. Huxley's Brave New
World has as its target representations of a blind faith in the idea of social and technological
progress. It depicts a society in which human beings are treated like different model cars
trundling off the Ford assembly line as drudges or as self-indulgent but loveless upper-class
mindless twits hooked on orgies and drugs.
In contrast to dystopian novels like Huxley's and Orwell's, however, Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451 does not picture villainous dictators (like Orwell's O'Brien) or corrupt philosopher-kings

(like Huxley's Mustapha Mond), although Bradbury's Captain Beatty shares a slight similarity to
Mustapha Mond. The crucial difference is that Bradbury's novel does not focus on a ruling elite
nor does it portray a higher society, but rather, it portrays the means of oppression and
regimentation through the life of an uneducated and complacent, though an ultimately honest and
virtuous, working-class hero (Montag). In contrast, Orwell and Huxley choose to portray the
lives of petty bureaucrats (Winston Smith and Bernard Marx, respectively), whose alienated lives
share similarities to the literary characters of author Franz Kafka.
Whereas Huxleys citizens were amused into mindlessness, Orwells are treated much
more brutally, with torture and murder of dissidents being commonplace. In this novel, unlike
Huxleys, loveless sex is a means of protest; and endless, inescapable television propaganda
broadcasts have replaced reading.
In Orwells culture television is a two-way tool which watches the citizens even more intently
than the citizens watch it. He never really explains how everyone can be spied on so intently
without at least one half of the population watching the other half. The improbability of this
arrangement is typical of dystopias, which seldom strive to create plausible portraits of a
degraded future culture, but instead exaggerate certain tendencies in order to isolate and
highlight them.

Plenty of similarity exists between these works. All three imagine a technocratic social order
maintained through oppression and regimentation and by the complete effacement of the
individual. All these authors envision a population distracted by the pursuit of explicit images,
which has the effect of creating politically debilitated individuals.
Huxley envisions a World State in which war has been eradicated in order to achieve
social stability; Bradbury and Orwell imagine that war itself achieves the same end by
keeping the population cowering in fear of an enemy attack, whether the enemy is real or not.
The war maintains the status quo because any change in leaders may topple the defense structure.
Orwell and Bradbury imagine the political usefulness of the anesthetization of experience: All
experiences become form without substance. The population is not able to comprehend that all
they do is significant and has meaning Likewise, Bradbury and Huxley imagine the use of
chemical sedatives and tranquilizers as a means of compensating for an individual's alienated

existence. More importantly, all three authors imagine a technocratic social order accomplished
through the suppression of books that is, through censorship.
Censorship suggests that many different factors could combine to create this result. These factors
can be broken into two groups: factors that lead to a general lack of interest in reading and
factors that make people actively hostile toward books. The novel doesnt clearly distinguish
these two developments. Apparently, they simply support one another.
Caches of books, when discovered, are burned by firemen whose job is eradicating print.
Socialization has been reduced to group television viewings, and creativity narrowed into brief
moments in shows when the audience is prompted to respond to the virtual events they are
witnessing, and which absorb them far more than the real world around them.

The first group of factors includes the popularity of competing forms of entermainment such as
TV and radio. More broadly, Bradbury thinks that the presence of fast cars, loud music,and
advertisements creates a lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has the time to
focus. Also, the huge mass of published material is too overwhelming to think about, leading to a
society that reads condensed books (which were very popular at the time Bradbury was writing)
rather thanthe real thing.
The second group of factors, those that make people hostile toward books, involves envy. People
do not like to feel inferior to those who have read more than they have. But the novel implies that
the most important factor that leads to censorship is the objections of special-interest groups and
minorities to things in books that offend them. Bradbury is careful to refrain from referring
specifically to racial minorities. Beatty mentioned dog lovers and cat lovers, for example. The
reader can only try to infer which special-interest group he really had in mind.

However, despite their similarities, you can also draw a crucial distinction between these books.
If the failure of the proles (citizens of the lowest class; workers) reveals Orwell's despair at the
British working-class political consciousness, and if Mustapha Mond reveals Huxley's cynical
view of the intellectual, Guy Montag's personal victory over the government system represents
American optimism. This train of thought leads back to Henry David Thoreau, whose Civil
Disobedience Bradbury must hold in high esteem. Recall the remark by Juan Ramon Jimenez
that serves as an epigraph to Fahrenheit 451: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."

This epigraph could have easily served as Thoreau's motto and is proof of Bradbury's interest in
individual freedom. Bradbury's trust in the virtue of the individual and his belief in the inherently
corrupt nature of government is a central concept of Fahrenheit 451.1
Continuing Bradbury's inspection of personal freedom in Fahrenheit 451, you must first examine
the freedoms that the author gives to the characters. As mentioned previously, you know that all
sense of past was obliterated by the entrance of technology (the TV characters give citizens the
opportunity to create a past and present through their story lines). Likewise, through the use of
TV, individuals do not understand the importance of the past in their own lives. They have been
repeatedly given propaganda about the past, so they have no reason to question its authenticity or
value.
Also, because of the technology the characters are given, no one (of course, except for Faber,
Granger, Clarisse, and eventually Montag) understands the value of books in direct relation to
their own personal development. Television, for the majority of individuals in Fahrenheit 451,
does not create conflicting sentiments or cause people to think, so why would they welcome
challenge? As Millie points out to Montag, "Books aren't people. You read and I look all around,
but there isn't anybody! . . . My 'family' is people. They tell me things: I laugh, they laugh. . . ."2
Because the majority of this dystopian society is not able to express personal freedom, it is
interesting that Clarisse and the unidentified old woman die early in the novel in order to display
what has happened so far in this society to the people who exercise their personal freedom. It's
also important to see that even Millie, who serves as the model of this society's conformity,
almost dies as a result of her one act of personal rebellion when she attempts suicide. Likewise,
perhaps even Captain Beatty's demise is an act of personal freedom because Beatty goads
Montag into killing him instead of protecting himself and remaining alive.
The battle of having personal freedom is essential in this book because Bradbury demonstrates
what happens when man is not given the opportunity to express his thoughts or remember his
past. Through Clarisse, the unidentified woman, Millie, and Beatty, you are shown the
1 http://www.cliffsnotes.com
2 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg 34. Paperback , January 10, 2012

consequences of what happens when humans aren't allowed to fully express their individuality
and choice (death). Through the characters of Montag, Faber, and Granger, you can see how one
individual can make a difference in society if that one individual can fully realize the importance
of his or her past, as well as be willing to fight for the opportunity to express himself or herself.

It is easy to see why the book was warmly received when it was published in 1953. The
prosperity of post-war America created a mass culture of vast complacency which valued
conformity and blandness. The edginess which Bradburys beloved science fiction, horror, and
fantasy featured was suspect. There were plenty of voices raised in protest, celebrating
nonconformity, individualism, and creativity; and a large number of these voices belonged to
science fiction writers.
One of the most striking characteristics of the novel to be frequently overlooked is its setting in
an era of recurrent atomic war. In 1950, when Bradbury was writing, the Russians had just the
previous year exploded their first atomic bomb, making real the nuclear arms race that had only
been fantasized before. The first thermonuclear weapon was not to be tested for another year,
though Bradbury depicts a society which has already weathered two atomic wars. As in Orwells
novel, there are suggestions that this state of war is designed to preserve the supremacy of the
tyrannical regime which governs this dystopia. A final apocalyptic nuclear exchange at the end of
the novel marks its fall, but it is so briefly and distantly described that most readers entirely
forget about it, as they forget about the much more vividly depicted annihilation of Earth by
nuclear war in The Martian Chronicles.
Both of these are instances of what I like to call muscular disarmament,3 in which one
final cataclysmic war is depicted as preparing the way for an era of peace and enlightenment.
One of the earliest examples was H. G. Wells 1914 novel The World Set Free in whichas the
title suggestsatomic weapons clear the ground for the emergence of a utopia. Bradbury doesnt
go that far, but clearly the holocaust at the end of the novel is meant to be more cheering than
horrifying. We are also expected to sympathize with Montags murder of Beatty with the
flamethrower. Stories like these are the intellectuals equivalent of gory computer games in
which players can take out their frustrations on imaginary foes by blasting them to bits. When we
3 https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/451.htm

think about the essential image of Bradbury we remember the scenes he evokes of sitting on the
porch sipping lemonade and listening to the hum of cicadas and forget the fictional mayhem he
sometimes inflicts on the people he disdains.
It is also easy to see why Fahrenheit 451 would seem especially timely today. Thanks to the
Patriot Act, government agents secretly track the reading habits of citizens based on the books
they borrow from libraries. Web technology makes it possible to go even further, and determine
what sites people are browsing. It is not uncommon to hear of the electronic trails left by Web
browsers being introduced as evidence in trials.
We have robot dogs and execution by lethal injection, though we have not yet combined the two.
But we identify criminals by their unique DNA signatures much as the Hound of the novel
identifies them by their unique smell.
Modern anti-depressants are often more effective than the tranquilizers taken by Montags wife,
but her zombie-like state is all too familiar. Depression is so common and widely discussed today
that she no longer seems as bizarre as Bradbury probably intended her to be.
American popular culture has always been profoundly anti-elitist and anti-intellectual, and that
has not changed. A president who tells us students must be held to higher standards himself
makes no effort to exemplify intellectual curiosity or profundity.
All these are reasons that Bradburys novel resonates with contemporary readers. However, it is
worth noting the ways in which our world differs from that of Fahrenheit 451.
We have our big-screen TVs, some of them approaching wall size; but increasingly we refuse to
be passive recipients of what the networks want to hand out. We Tivo our favorite shows and
skip past the commercials, infuriating the sponsors. DVD technology lets us view the films we
want when we want. The mass quality of mass communications is eroding, and the television
network executives and advertisers are growing frantic as they see the impending end of an era.
Television viewing, though still consuming a huge amount of our leisure time, is actually
declining as people spend more time playing video games or using the Web. The Internet is
notoriously the greatest innovation that science fiction failed to anticipate, and it is far more
anarchic, individualized, and unregulated than the mass media which preceded it and which
shaped the nightmares of earlier dystopian writers.

The Internet has also helped to reverse in some measure the decline in reading. The classics
Bradbury cites as endangered in his novel are all available for reading or downloading via the
Webthough the foreign ones are usually available only in dated public-domain translations. On
the Web the classics are more accessible than contemporary fiction and poetry, which remain
locked in limited-circulation books and magazines.
The seashells that people insert in their ears today are ear buds through which people listen to
highly individualized playlists of songs on their devices, and they can even listen to an audio
study guide for The Martian Chronicles, though the novel itself doesnt seem to be available yet
for downloading from the iTunes Store or some other famous and consumerist medium.

CONCLUSION
In modern days and society, we see technology (mostly led by consumerism) entertaining in the
same way as seashells in Fahrenheit 451, home cinema systems play the function of parlour
walls and electronic literature is usurping the traditional paperback. There is no more need to feel
the scent of an old book, whereas everything has been digitalized and hard copy books and
literature are replaced with electronic ones. We come to wonder, is Bradburys dystopic
prediction the one we are living in now, or are we that close? I am at this moment capable of
sharing my personal opinion without being ostracized (well, not entirely), incarcerated, or even
incinerated along with my words for doing so. But for how long?
What is an everyday sight is a generation of young people which has grown up mostly textmessaging, blogging, social networking and creating Web sites online for whom reading and
writing are constant, natural activities. Much of the prose they generate and read is appalling by
traditional standards, but it is not just the passive consumption of images that Bradbury
envisioned.
The problem with dystopias and other cautionary forms is that their exaggeration can cause us to
become complacent because things just arent as bad as the novels predicted. But so long as we
read them thoughtfully and thoroughly, understanding that they are meant to point us toward
problems rather than accurately foretelling the future, they can still inspire us to work for a world
which, if not utopian, is a lot better than our worst nightmares.

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