Bradbury positions his readers, through the role that censorship plays in Fahrenheit 451, to see what can happen if a government is allowed to take total control. Through his extremist point of view, Bradbury conveys a message to the readers, explaining the consequences of censorship. For example, the government in Fahrenheit 451 has taken control and demanded that books be given the harshest measure of censorship; by methodical destruction through burning. According to Montag, the firemen’s official slogan is, “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Fauckner. (p.8)” The radical humor of this quotation conveys to us as readers the severe effects that censorship can have on a society.
Most of the people in Fahrenheit 451 are only aware of what the government wants them to be aware of, because that is all that they know; everything else is censored. Clarisse explains this to Montag, “I sometimes think that drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly…If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad, too?(p.9)” The government does not want people to see flowers, grass, houses, or cows, because it will evoke feelings so it makes them drive fast and it does not allow pedestrians.
In many aspects Bradbury’s novel is a criticism of what we now call the technological era. Bradbury conveys this criticism through the role that technology plays in a materialistic society like the one in his novel. The result of mass media and other technology is that people in Fahrenheit 451 have become monotonous and boring. Bradbury reveals this impact through Montag’s wife, Mildred. Mildred is the status quo of a dull society. She refers to the characters in the soap opera, and reality television like shows on her three gigantic televisions sets or “parlor walls” as “family”. To her they are more real than real life, and more important than her husband. We witness Mildred’s obsession for her parlor walls towards the end of Fahrenheit 451, when she betrays and deserts Montag, worrying about the safety of her parlor wall rather than her husband. Night after night Mildred has the “seashells” or radios plugged into both ears, “the electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. (p.12)” In Fahrenheit 451 technologies have developed so much that machines are capable of reviving someone’s life when they would otherwise be conceived dead. In one instance, Mildred overdoses on sleeping pills, and Montag calls the stomach-pump squad which “pumped all of the blood from the body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum. (p.15)”
When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 he predicted that humans would cultivate a thirst for violence, and that is reflected as a major theme in his novel. Clarisse is the only character who is aware of the violence, and she is the one who points it out to Montag. Through Clarisse, Montag comes to realizes that everyone is “either shouting or dancing around like wild animals beating up one and other.” Clarisse asks Montag, “Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays? (p.29)” This provokes Montag to question the values of his society. To express and emphasize the amount of violence bred in this society, Bradbury uses extremes. He exaggerates the violence in society to the extent that characters in Fahrenheit 451 release stress and have fun through violence. Clarisse describes this aspect of society by saying that, “they (the rulers) run us so ragged by the end of the day that we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball.(p.30)”
“Someday we’ll remember so much [about the past] that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steam shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up.(p.164)” In his futuristic novel, Bradbury creates a world that is constantly at war. This is described by the jets that are constantly “flying overhead, off in the distance.” It is no ordinary war that is being fought either, it is one of many nuclear wars, and it is also what will eventually lead to the destruction of the destroyers, when the entire city is bombed.
Some of Bradbury’s main points are expressed through symbolism. For example Bradbury compares mankind to a phoenix, a bird which lives in an eternal cycle. It is born, then it burns to ashes, and finally is resurrected from its ashes back to life, however it is trapped in this cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Similarly, humans make the same mistake over and over, and suffer the consequence over and over, ignoring the historical evidence of the mistake and its consequence. This is pointed out by Granger when he says “the difference is that we (humans) know the silly damn thing he just did! (p.163)” In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury explains that books are what contain evidence of historical mistakes and consequences. As long as books are censored, we will never learn from our past, and never brake out of our eternal cycle of birth, destruction and rebirth.
Bradbury addresses the way in which a totalitarian regime rules by fear in Fahrenheit 451. He wrote the book in the McCarthy era, a time of oppression in post World War Two United States. This, no doubt influenced the extent to which Bradbury portrays the totalitarian regime ruling its people by terror. The “mechanical hound” is an example of that extent. Anyone caught with books that refuses to give themselves up is injected with lethal chemicals by the mechanical hound. The firemen also evoke fear in the people as Clarisse explains, “So many people are. Afraid of friremen…(p.6)”
In Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury predicts the evolution of society from 1953 to the 2400’s with what so far appears to be amazing accuracy. An example of Bradbury’s anticipation of the evolution of society is school violence. In 1953, when Fahrenheit 451 was published, school violence was unheard of, and now it is increasing all over the United States at frightening rates. Bradbury anticipates this increase in teenage violence in his novel when he writes about children, “from twelve to sixteen, out whistling, yelling hurrahing, had seen a man, a very extraordinary sight, a man strolling, a rarity, and simply said, “lets get him”, not knowing he was a fugitive Mr. Montag, simply a number of children out for a long night of roaring five or six hundred miles in a few moonlit hours, their faces icy with the wind, and coming home or not coming at dawn, alive or not alive, that made the adventure.(p.128)” This is accentuated when we read Montag’s disbelief that, “had he not been out of the way, the teenagers would have killed him, for no reason at all in the world!”
Bradbury presents many other aspects of how our world has evolved today, fifty two years ago, with shocking accuracy. Bradbury in the afterward correctly presumes the “condensation” and “censoring” of literature. In his book, Bradbury conveys censorship through ‘book burning’. Similarly, in contemporary society books are being removed from shelves of libraries and schools because they contain traces of profanity, homosexuality, sex, drugs, racism or even rebellious children. There are modern parallels to “seashell” radios and “parlor walls”, which are walkmans or portable compact disk and MP3’s, and large screen plasma televisions. Bradbury’s interpretation of interactive television and realistic television also corresponds to reality television and soap operas. There are even books today which have been censored, including classics such as “Huckleberry Finn”, and ironically “Fahrenheit 451”. In the Afterward of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury writes, “Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 sections from [Fahrenheit 451].(Interview with Bradbury)”
In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury expresses a number of important messages and ideas that concern the future of mankind. None of these messages is more alarming than the fact that the loss of characters freedom to read and to think was not an act that was forced on the people, but rather one embraced by the people, either because they do not find the content of literature appropriate or because technology makes takes the place of literature. The terrifying resemblance that Bradbury’s vision of the twenty fourth century bears to the world today only further extends the possibility that some day our world might become no different from the world which Guy Montag lived in. Bradbury describes this world, “Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito- out! Every simile that would have a sub-moron’s mouth twitch- gone! Any aside that explained the two- bit philosophy of a first rate writer- lost!....Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention- shot dead.(Afterward)”
