Book Review: 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury

It is a novel emerging from the world of dystopia, the world of a corrupt city that prohibits the circulation, possession, and reading of books; and even assigns fire brigades whose primary mission is different from those we usually realize, which is to set fires rather than put them out; These groups' job was to burn illegal goods (books) in addition to burn libraries and homes where they were hidden. Fahrenheit 451 was first published in 1953 by the American writer Ray Bradbury.

A photo by Pep Boatella Illustrations

“Are you happy?”... This question, despite its simplicity, had a resounding resonance in Guy Guy Montag's soul, the fireman whose job is destroying and burning illegal goods (printed books) in that mysterious city, as well as destroying homes and libraries that are hiding them. Montag never questioned the amount of destruction and devastation resulting from his actions, as he was returning to his sweet life and his glasshouse made of giant television screens, overwhelmed with contentment and satisfaction after each burning operation he performed, however, the appearance of his young neighbor Clarisse plays an important role in Montag's character evolution, through the questions she was asking him, which urged him to question everything he was doing, and eventually provoked his intellectual awakening.

Montag was living in a time where the machine dominated human societies, and imposed its conditions, modernity, and means until it outperformed humans and abolished many distinctive human characteristics, and the ways of spreading knowledge today have become shorter and faster through television screens in its three dimensions, and the acquisition of books has become a form of disobedience against the state and a violation of the law, a crime that calls for firefighting teams to burn it and erase any trace of it. This man is a product of a culture that devalues thinking and instead valued superficial entertainments that gradually numb the mind until it reaches its final coma.

So “Are you happy”?… This question made Montague realize that he is in fact immersed in despair, hence, he decided to begin a journey of rebellion against the mechanism of censorship of literature and the destruction of knowledge, as he began stealing as many books as he could from the houses that he was going to burn with his colleagues; hoping that these books might reveal to him secrets that could save society from its imminent self-destruction. And this is what he realized one day when he saw in one of those burning missions a woman who chose to die with her books by burning!

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

A Scene from Fahrenheit 451 film (2018)

The phenomenon of burning books is considered to be an effective tool to control people, and when talking about book burning, we can only evoke the incident of burning more than 25,000 volumes of books in German universities around 34 cities at the time of the Nazis, as an explicit declaration of the start of literary cleansing, and total control over the culture.

So Ray Bradbury's message is frighteningly true. If wisdom can be taken away from people, then their freedom can be taken away. If knowledge burns, people will be in a state of complete ignorance, there will be no room for free-thinking, and this way you can tell them anything about history, art, politics, and even themselves.

In this corrupt city of unknown time and place, people became hostile towards books because they felt inferior to the educated reader, and objections to certain messages in books by interest groups and minorities led to imposing censorship on it; In the end, it was felt that books and learning in general created inequality and unhappiness, and so books were banned with the aim of achieving equality and making everyone the same.

Some argue that this novel was written in the fifties of the last century as a protest scream against "McCarthyism" which refers to Senator 'Joseph McCarthy' who practiced his cultural terrorism on writers and intellectuals on charges of communism, but in fact, it is not a book about censorship as much as it is about "How Television Destroys Interest in Reading Literature," Bradbury himself has repeatedly stated this. But was Bradbury right in his apprehension?

We can say that the world today is better than it was 60 or 70 years ago. Despite entering the era of computers, electronics, and social networks, people have not become so stupid or insane as to start a war against books. In fact, reading has always been the prerogative of a minority in a society, and television will do little to kill it. On the contrary, thanks to technology, more books are being written, published, and read than at any other time in history. Today you are able to get your electronic copy of any book while you are sitting on your sofa, with one click of a button, at a low price or even for free!

In addition to the fact that reading and watching TV are two completely different experiences that provide different types of knowledge, Bradbury's criticism on TV that it will become more pervasive and a haven for young minds may also apply to books. What is the difference between watching silly programs and reading books that provide false information, for example?

Accordingly, some critics argue that some readers often choose to understand Bradbury's book as a story about censorship rather than technology because this allows the modern reader to get closer to the world depicted in the novel.

It seems that 'Bradbury' was immersed in his melancholy when he wrote this novel, although the digital age was still decades away from him, he chose for humanity a pessimistic fate, he found that the best way to protect thought is to transform humans themselves into an audio memory that preserves world’s heritage and culture, turn them into books and plays, but from flesh and blood instead of papers that disappeared with the disappearance of printing, so you find in front of you, for example, Mr. “Shakespeare’s Plays”, and the other is “The Complete Collection of Bertrand Russell”, here is the “bible”, and there is the “Book of Politics of Aristotle”.

Each seeks to preserve his memory and his life to tell future generations the stories of the ancients, their poems, their philosophy, and their knowledge as if we are bringing civilization back to the stage of oral rather than writing. For the writer, this was the only way for thousands of people to rebel against the anarchy of robotic society. What a frustrated retroactive step back!

Book Information

Book: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Originally published: 1953

Pages: 256 Genre: Dystopian