Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury: An Analysis

Tick, tick, tick. Time passes without our consent. It slips through our fingers like water, leaving a damp memory, and no means as to what to hold onto. We are utterly powerless. Some splash in the deep end, like Mildred. “Mildred kicked at a book. “Books aren’t people. You read and I look all around, but there isn’t anybody!”(Bradbury, 69). She wanted more screens around her to fill her empty mind. While others dip their toes in, like the covert professor Faber who relentlessly locked himself away with his books. “The old man looked as if he had not been out of the house in years”(Bradbury, 76). But the ever changing current has a way of manifesting itself onto society, and in the case of “Fahrenheit 451”by Ray Bradbury, burning books was

Montag. “Nobody listens anymore. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say”(Bradbury, 78). Montag lives in a society where time has changed everything. Nobody is curious about the things around them. Nobody questions things. No one believes. No one thinks. If this was put into perspective with modern day society, Charles M. Blow’s essay, “Reading Books Is Fundamental”, reads that “...nearly a quarter of American adults have not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a kindle, or even hit play on an audio book while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978”(Blow). Maybe this is what the future holds. As modern time changes, soon paper books will become old things, precious old things. A worn out idea that no one thinks about. But only time has the answer. In comparison to Frederick Douglass, a slave in the 1800’s, Montag sees his knowledge of books as more of a burden. He looks at his wife and upon society, envying their ignorance. For now that he is knowledgeable he has so many questions, and it was so easy to be in that same society which now, he sees as flawed. “... I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my