Fears For The Future: Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

Clara Bergeson

Guinn/Walker

World Literature and Composition

12 October 2015

Fears for the Future Throughout history, there have been many nations that feed off of: what people don’t know, the fear of change, and the destruction that comes with that. During World War II, Hitler had incredible amounts of propaganda that he used to control how people grow up and think as well as to create mayhem. When Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the late 1940’s to early 1950’s these facts were fresh in his mind. In his novel, he creates a society that shows his fears for future societies if stagnation, ignorance, and chaos continue to grow within the world. He uses firemen, censorship through technology, and the symbolism of fire to show these fears

It starts with five monkeys, a pole, and some bananas. They put the five animals in a room with the pole leading to the bananas. Every time a monkey goes up the pole, water sprays over all of them. After a while, the monkeys would pulverize anyone that started to climb the pole. This continued even after they replaced the monkeys one-by-one. Eventually, there were no original monkeys in the room, but they were still beating each other up without even knowing why (Altfeld 7). This represents how when one generation is taught something, usually by force or threats, it continues down the line of generations. In Fahrenheit 451 this idea of nothing changing is represented by the firemen and how they enforce the government’s rule of stagnation. On page 31 the main character, Guy Montag, asks, “Didn’t firemen prevent fires than stoke them up and get them going?” (Bradbury 31). After Montag asks this question, which clearly stretches over the status quo, the other firemen around him start to laugh. They immediately direct Montag to the rule book that carries a small history of firemen. It says how there have always been firemen who start fires and never one that puts them out. However, firemen are also the ones who enforce the ideas of stagnation into the citizens instead of them learning through history. The firemen make the society stagnate, or, in this case,

However, that is not true. This simply means the situation will never change. In Fahrenheit 451 Beatty tells Montag, “Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more,” (Bradbury 52). Here Beatty is talking about how in their society people have become so reliant on technology, that after college everyone goes back to relying on the tabloids for information. Also, because people rely on technology for facts, all they are getting are censored bits of information that do not have anything to do with the actual subject. An example of this is when Mildred has friends over and they discuss politics. Mrs. Boles says, “What possessed the ‘Outs’ to run him? You just don’t go running a little short man like that against a tall man. Besides-he mumbled. Half the time I couldn’t hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn’t understand!” (Bradbury 93). Instead of her focus being on the actual views of the candidates, she only pays attention to whether or not they are good looking. In this society, technology makes everyone more vulnerable to distractions. The television reaches from top-to-bottom on one-to-four walls and is only used for entertainment instead of factual programs. Even the news reports they have are used for enjoyment value. Technology is a