Fahrenheit 451 Controversy

Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel written by Ray Bradbury that was published in 1953. The protagonist of the novel is Guy Montag, better known as Montag. Montag works as a fireman, and he has a wife named Mildred. However, in this dystopian society, firemen are different. Instead of being tasked with putting out fires, they are tasked with starting fires to burn books. This is because books have been outlawed by the government, and the people felt that they were a threat to their joy. Books had caused controversy in society, and no matter what, some people always felt that they were targeting minorities. So to make people happy, books began to be banned to cause less controversy and disagreement in society. At the beginning of the novel,

Later in the novel, the firmen had gotten a call for a house, and it was later revealed it was Montag’s house. Montag is tasked by Beatty with burning down his own house. After Montag has burned down his own house, he describes that “the house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleep pinky-gray cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty in the morning. The crowd drew back into the house; the great tents of the circus had slumped into charcoal and rubble and the show was well over” (Bradbury 117). Here Bradbury uses a metaphor to describe Montag’s house as “a circus [that] had slumped into charcoal and rubble and [that] the show was well over”. And in a circus, takes place a show. The show being, Montag’s life, as commonly hinted throughout other pieces of figurative language in the novel. This is since he puts on a facade for society, pretending like he is conforming to society, but he actually wants to uncover the truth and seek knowledge. With the circus being slumped over, the show no longer can go on. Meaning that with the loss of Montag’s house, his life can not go on the same anymore. And the lost of his circus and show happened because he wanted to seek the truth. Similarly, Montag also later describes the debris of his house as “a great earthquake had come with fire and leveled the house and Mildred was under

He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one thing the phoenix never had. We know the silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation (Bradbury