Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a classic dystopian novel about a society that has banned all books. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to locate books and burn them, the buildings that contain them, and the people that own them. Much of the book extolls the benefits of reading, especially classics, to develop critical thought about philosophy and freedom.
Guy, like many dystopian protagonists, is naïve and lost. Everyone he meets ends up confusing him. His fire chief tries to talk him through his crisis of confidence. A girl, Clarisse, (“And as many times he came out of the house and Clarisse was there somewhere in the world”) first baffled him, and when she inexplicably disappeared, he became depressed and disillusioned. Faber was a professor who told Guy about alternative and how to escape which Guy attempted. Through it all Guy is always a lost child, maybe representing everyone in this dystopia.
This futurist fiction foresees location tracking of cell phones and the fear that robots will come alive. Most interestingly he traces universal censorship (“Burn all, burn every thing. Fire is bright and fire is clean”) to ‘political correctness.’
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred… Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it.”
This book has the idea that books could be save by individuals memorizing them, reminiscent of pre-literate India. “And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer…”
Few women in this book.
This is a classic about freedom and censorship. Everyone should read it once… or more.
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