Concise Summary of Fahrenheit 451, Book Review Example

“There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine,

to make a woman stay in the burning house;

there must be something there.

You don’t stay for nothing”

(Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451).

Thesis Statement

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is the story about the world in which people no longer choose to think for themselves. It’s not only about the problem of censorship and mass media that take away people’s ability to set questions beginning with “why” rather than “how”. But it’s also about people’s inability to see how step by step they loose their own morals, values, thoughts, beliefs and in the end their freedom. The theme of Fahrenheit 451 was of great importance and truthfulness back in 1950s as well as it is today.

It seems to me that the main purpose of the story and the main intention of Ray Bradbury for writing it was based on the author’s desire to show people the true value of books, the necessity for reading and writing them, and the importance of literature for the development of independent personalities as well as for the development of the whole mankind. For me books are not simply a way to spend free time, or a certain source of amusement, but it is something much deeper – it is a way of living, the source of truth and wisdom.

I think that the main idea of the book Fahrenheit 451 is based on the feeling of emptiness and uselessness of life that Guy Montag started to feel at certain point of his life and on his struggle to find the meaning of life through books. Books don’t only contain the history of the civilization, the account of the past and the process of human development, but as Faber said “the value of books lies in the detailed awareness of life that they contain” (Bradbury 83). People may disagree with books and authors, they may find certain topics to be boring and meaningless, they may even find certain things written in books to be insulting, but the main idea of it all is that people have the possibility to think, to analyze, to make their own decisions and to act upon them. The world that is depicted in Fahrenheit 451 is without future because in it people no longer want to have feelings of guilt and responsibility, to go through inner moral debates and struggles. It is much easier to live without thinking what’s right and wrong, but such a life full of useless entertainment and joy without any kind of moral development – it is not a true life, it is a mere existence. If in the past people were fighting for gaining freedom of choice, thought and word, in the future world of Fahrenheit 451 firemen are fighting for freedom from thought and choice.

It seems to me that in regards to the value of books and the amount of them being read by people the American society that was depicted by Bradbury in his story is not that different from the one in which we live today. Apart from the process of books’ burning everything else is pretty the same. Nowadays, the vast majority of people choose to listen to the radio and to watch TV rather than to read books simply because mass media offers them ready opinions and decisions without the necessity to analyze and make one’s own choices about what to believe in. “Almost everything in Fahrenheit 451 has come about, one way or the other – the influence of television, the rise of local TV news, the neglect of education. As a result, one area of our society is brainless. But I utilized those things in the novel because I was trying to prevent a future, not predict one” (Bradbury and Geirland 10). People no longer want to read about the events that happened in the past, about people who made their contribution to the development of our world, about the ways in which people were thinking and acting long before we were born simply because they have too much mess in their own lives and they want to have some fun in their free time. The truth is that people have stopped caring about anything or anyone but themselves and their own problems, they are no longer interested in asking questions and seeking answers as Clarisse McClellan did. In our world there is the same alienation and isolation of people from each other as in the world portrayed by Bradbury. It seems to me that step by step we stop being interested in each other and the world around us, we loose our ability to observe and comprehend the world through our observations.

The topics of indifference and intolerance are of great importance in the story.

In Fahrenheit 451 the process of dissatisfaction with books originated when various minority groups became insulted by certain books. So eventually writers started to care not about the topics they wanted to reveal in their books, but rather about how not to insult anyone by the things they write. Thus books became meaningless, because they all revealed the same themes. “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women’s Lib / Republican / Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever” (Bradbury 19). In such a way people no longer want to tolerate things that they don’t like or don’t understand, if something or someone is different from their idea of appropriate and right – then such a thing or person has no right to exist, it must be destroyed. It is much easier simply to say that something is not appropriate rather then to try to understand why it is happening and what meaning and purpose this “something” has. Such a way of destroying things and people that doesn’t fit in the circle of appropriate is a mere degradation of society.

Thus I may conclude that for me the main theme of the book Fahrenheit 451 is the struggle of the author to restore through his story and characters the wonderful world of literature and books that is being neglected and underestimated. I understand that in this story Ray Bradbury had also raised a number of other important issues, including the negative role of censorship and mass media, fear of nuclear war, alienation of people from each other, their indifference and intolerance. But for me all these problems result exactly from people’s unwillingness to learn through the mistakes of the former generations, to explore the past and the present, to observe, analyze and interpret the world around them. And all these come through books.

References

Bradbury, Ray. Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953.

Geirland, John. “Bradbury’s Tomorrowland.” Wired 6.10 (1998): 9-11.