The dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is set in a futuristic American city where books are outlawed by the government. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman. Firemen in this time start fires instead of putting them out, their job is to burn books and the houses they find them in. Their society is basically composed of people numbing themselves with TV and radio sets that never leave their ears. The government figured out that if they keep people mindlessly happy then they don’t have to worry about conflicting opinions and minority groups getting offended. The constant stimulation of fast cars, music, and TV also caused the population to lose interest in reading, they don’t have the attention span to do it. The ideas of a …show more content…
Although books in the novel did die out on their own when people didn’t want to bother reading them anymore, the government still took it to another step to ban books so people couldn’t have conflicting ideas, so people couldn’t think for themselves, so people couldn’t question anything. The citizens of the dystopian society believe whatever the TV tells them. Such an example is when the mechanical hound loses Montag’s scent during the chase, "They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't admit . They know they can hold thew their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick!! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night. So they're sniffing for a scapegoat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes!" (Bradbury 148). The government knows they can’t admit show weakness to the people, so they lie and say they caught Montag so everyone keeps believing them without question. This relates to today in how the government controls what the general public sees. An average person might watch CNN and read the paper, and that’s the only way they know what’s going on. Meanwhile news channels are doing reports on cute dog tricks and celebrities half the time, or they show a watered down, carefully picked version of something. It’s turning people’s brains into slush because they don’t know what is actually going on in the world, the real issues. The world in the novel being a bit of a more extreme