The 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury tells the tale of a dystopian future in which censorship rules all.Throughout the text, the narrator uses the setting to shape the psychological and moral traits in certain characters, while also illuminating the theme of the story. Toward the beginning of the book, it is shown that Montag, the protagonist, and his firefighting team has burned many books at once, along with the woman who owned them. Montag, after the fact, begins to question these actions. He wonders why the United States has resolved to this burning of books and mass censorship. The narrator displays this in order to compare the setting with Montag’s development as a character. This revelation comes up in conversation with Montag’s …show more content…
This dystopian America is characterized by a lack of reading, free thinking, and meaningful relationships. Bradbury uses these elements in order to highlight the argument that censorship is detrimental to society in a multitude of ways. Clarisse McClellan, a young girl that Montag encounters on the way home from work, illustrates the frustration of censorship through speaking on the setting; specifically how she sees it when she is in cars. The narrator establishes this when Clarisse says “I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” and “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?” (Bradbury, 9). Clarisse states how the censorship in this setting is causing a distortion in the understanding of the natural world. This, in turn, decreases the quality of life for members of the society because of how much the world has to offer them. Censorship becomes the primary theme of the text due to how the setting of the story