Common Themes In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

Themes that are apparent in the book Fahrenheit 451 are violence, cultures of the past, and ignorance of knowledge. Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel set in the future written by Ray Bradbury. It imagines a future where books are banned and everyone has a tv in their house as their main entertainment. It specifically focuses on one character named Guy Montag and his role as a fireman in that society because firemen start fires to burn books instead of stopping fires. Montag meets a girl named Clarisse who opens his eyes to the reality he is living in; the reality of a corrupted society. He starts to see the flaws in the society and eventually tries to help dissipate them. The main theme in the book is that when you give up cultures of the

During the book, Mildred, Guy’s wife, overdoses on sleeping pills leading to Guy calling the emergency services. The emergency services send people to help but when they get there Guy is very surprised to learn that they weren’t even doctors! He ask why they did not send a doctor and is told, “You do not need an M.D., case like this; all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour” (15). The fact that the emergency services does not send an actual doctor or even take Mildred to the hospital, shows that a lot of people overdose, and that people are so used to those kinds of cases that they are able to send two unqualified men to help. This definitely shows that getting a medic’s help is a thing of the past because the society has become reliant on machines to do all the

Kids still go to school but they do not learn the same things because the government has decided to make it so, “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored” (55). School is like this because the government does not want their citizens to be smarter than them or to get any ideas about how things could be, instead of what they are now. Clarisse used to go to school but not anymore because she does not like how she is taught or what she is taught. A typical school day is, “An hour of TV class, and hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you,bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not” (29-30). Clarisse makes a good point about being flung a bunch of information from the tv teacher that the kids never remember. Students also do not ask any questions which is what school was based upon in the past. Because kids are sitting still all day with almost no break and they are not being taught any