Examples Of Pain In Fahrenheit 451

Is pain necessary in order to feel pleasure? Does feeling pain mean you understand the world? Even though these are different questions, they are connected; we see in The Giver and in Fahrenheit 451 that pain is necessary to experience true pleasure and to then truly understand the world. We can see this through the characters in The Giver only having shallow feelings of happiness and a limited understanding of the world when they have not experienced pain, Jonas recognizing how he can experience much more pleasure and understand the world because of pain, and in Fahrenheit 451, we see examples of how ridding one’s life of pain and complexity only leads to a dull, emotionless life.

In The Giver, we see how characters in the book seem to have

To elaborate on this, Jonas, after receiving a meaningful and foreign memory of love, asks his parents if they love him. They respond with amusement and say that love is a generalized and meaningless word; Jonas, because he now understands the world differently through memories, feels confused and hurt after this. The community in The Giver has retired the use of the word love because they are afraid of it - love comes with feelings of happiness, individuality, and more, though it also inevitably comes with pain along the way. Since the community in The Giver avoids emotions with depth, they have retired the use of them. Thus, they will never experience true, meaningful feelings of love, happiness, and pleasure, and will never understand the complexity of the world that comes with

In Farenheit’s society, people are not content, but they do not seem to know why. People commit suicide, and people are bored, but they mostly seem oblivious to the causes of the problems in their surroundings. They experience what they think is pleasure by burning books and keeping their society protected from conflicts. In Fahrenheit 451, Granger concludes that a life without risks, pain, or books is not one worth living. He came to this conclusion because he, like Montag, lived in a society where books were forbidden and no risks were taken. He is able to explain how ridding one’s life of pain and complexity leads to a dull, emotionless life, as seen through the quote: "‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'" Fahrenheit 451, page