Examples Of Happiness In Fahrenheit 451

Happiness Finds You Finding happiness is a journey that many people call life. Being happy is a main goal of our world. Society tries to sell happiness as money, and pleasure, and feeling good all the time. However, it is impossible to control life. One cannot go through life problem free. Fahrenheit 451 is a book about what happens when a society tries to control happiness, so that everyone can always feel good. In reaching for joy, they tried to eliminate discomfort. However, the world is not a comfortable place, no matter how hard you try, and as long as there are ideas, there is conflict. Seeing this, the people of Fahrenheit 451 tried to eliminate ideas. They burned books, and in doing so, they burned the meaning out of their lives. They

Mrs. Mildred Montag has the “perfect” life. She does not work inside or outside of the home. Her only responsibility is to have no responsibility for anything, to just have “fun” watching the parlor TV, driving fast, “talking” with her friends. However, she is one of the most unhappy characters in the whole story. She lives to watch the parlor “family” of characters, and at night she listens to two small “seashell radios” to drown out any thoughts she might be having. She has no conscious idea that she is not happy. Near the beginning of the story, Montag finds that Mildred has consumed an entire bottle of sleeping pills in one night. He calls the emergency number, and two machine operators come to pump her stomach. In the morning, Mildred does not remember a thing, and just believes she has a hangover, even after Montag tries to tell her the truth. It is unclear whether she actually tried to kill herself, or if she just kept taking the pills and then forgetting about them, longing for the blankness of sleep. Either way, no matter what she thinks, Mildred is not happy. Her life, the life the society of Fahrenheit 451 fought for, the life of constant fun and no consequences, is so pointless. Later, when Montag is outside the city, now under siege, with the book people, he remembers Mildred. She is in the city, and in grave danger. Granger tries to comfort him by saying that people are never really gone, their

The people of Montag’s society are banned from reading books, and Montag’s profession is to burn them. No one wanted to suffer the uncomfortable disagreements that books and the opinions in them cause, so they removed the books. This caused people to stop thinking deeply about things, and most of them do not even realize what they are missing. There are still a few, like Clarisse and her family, and Faber, who know they want to think. Clarisse, when explaining why she is homeschooled, mentions that the teachers never wanted to tell her why things are; they just wanted to shove information down her throat. Clarisse wants to understand things, and to have the freedom to think, and so she is labeled “antisocial” and has to go to a psychologist. While the people in Fahrenheit 451 do not seem to be overly controlled physically, they have little mental freedom. That is why a woman burned herself with her books instead of letting the firemen take her alive. That is why Montag itches to read, even when he does not know why. People need to be free to have their own opinions and beliefs to be