Beyond The City In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, he contrasts the settings of the city and beyond the river by conveying their differing moral opinions shown through conflicting point of views. Beyond the city and across the river was a whole other world comprised of people who thrived in their philosophical ways of life. On the other side of the spectrum is the city, which is the hub of censorship in the novel, opposing all that those across the river stand for? Thus creating a strong position for each setting and the beliefs of both. The city is afraid of ideas, therefore are rejected whole-heartedly by the government. Ideas spark discussions which become disagreements, leading to arguments and unhappiness. The solution, “burn everything, fire is bright ad fire is clean” (173). Within this socially deprived society people have lost the ability to just converse with one another, to the level where it was odd to merely talk with your family in your own home “her house lights were on…what’s going on. (He) had rarely seen that many house lights… just my mother and father and uncle

On his journey to the renegade society he crosses the river and as he does so “he felt as if he had left a stage of his life behind…moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new” (373), Montag’s past life was getting washed away as he began a new chapter in this abstract thinking community. All Montag’s life he had recognized fire to be used as a destructive force but in this new environment “it was not burning, it was warming” (388). This new perspective on fire was a result of escaping his formerly negative life by turning what was destructive into something that is beneficial. This emphasizes to the reader how truly degrading and restrictive the way that Montag had previously lived in the