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How Is Fahrenheit 451 Relevant Today

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Fahrenheit 451, the novel written by Ray Bradbury, is one of the most influential and popular books of the dystopian genre. It follows the character Guy Montag as he begins to realize that the world around him is not as perfect as he once thought, and that the government he has been working for may be barring him from trying to access the truth and find his purpose in life. The book itself also holds many parallels to the time period in which it was written, the 1950s. The 1950s was a period of fear for most, as it was in the aftermath of World War II and in the midst of the Cold War. Bradbury uses multiple elements of his dystopia, such as government control, superficiality, and a consumerist culture, to comment on and communicate his concerns …show more content…

If they started searching the whole damn river, it might take all night. So they’re sniffing for a scapegoat to end things with a bang. They’ll catch Montag in the next five minutes!’” (Bradbury 148). This passage encapsulates Bradbury’s growing concern with how people are becoming rushed and want something easy to watch (Pendery 52). The government is faking catching Montag because it knows that the people of America aren’t used to having to wait or think they’re in danger because there’s a criminal around, they think they must have an ending so that everyone can continue their lives normally.. Bradbury was concerned about the superficiality of the world, and how people only seemed to care about presentation, not the actual contents of anything they have been watching or consuming (Seed 228). Montag’s journey is that Bradbury is showing this concern (Zipes 128). Through Montag, Bradbury shows the discovery of the truth and how Montag is starting to see things the way they actually are, where the general population are only concerned with endings and physical appearances. i.e. a zipped 128. To reiterate, Bradbury’s use of dystopian themes in Fahrenheit 451 is a vehicle for his commentary about his concerns about the world after World War II and during the Cold

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Fahrenheit 451 is a novel written by Ray Bradbury that is set in the future, telling a story of a time where books and thinking by yourself are banned and frowned upon. In a time so dark, where people who want to improve their own being by thinking for themselves, are eventually apprehended and killed. Books and evidence of self-thinking are demolished, books are burned to a crisp, whereas ideas becomes a danger to society. In the story, Bradbury uses a bunch of literary techniques. He especially uses rhetorical devices with Beatty as he uses them to try and get his message through to Montag.

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Montag got caught by the captain of the fireman’s department, Beatty. Montag ends up killing Beatty in order to escape, and he meets a few people down by the river and joins their community, living in the shadows. Throughout the novel Bradbury uses language to express the

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I don’t even know what yet, but I’m going to do something big” (Bradbury 62). The evidence her shows how Montag has finally found knowledge and how he is going to rebel against the others

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Dystopian Affairs Ray Bradbury’s depiction of a dystopia is interpreted through Guy Montag and his escape from society as well as Captain Beatty and his desire to get rid of books when they explore the technology and its advances in his novel, Fahrenheit 451. Born in a time of despair from the ongoing World War II, Bradbury fell in love with books as well as horror from a young age, and he enjoyed the sense of adventure it created (“Ray”). Bradbury uses “Fahrenheit 451 [as a reflection of his] lifelong love of books and his defense of the imagination against the menace of technology and government manipulation” (“Ray”), and bases his plots, characters, and themes on his past experiences and memories. World War II is a time period when literature was suddenly disappearing and technology became greatly significant. Realizing the troubles technology will create, Bradbury wrote stories based on dystopian affairs, including his most powerful novel, Fahrenheit 451.

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In the book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury relates several of the challenges and aspects of the book to even society today. Though some might think that the book is completely out of touch and unrealistic, I view the events in the book & movie as a disaster waiting to happen in a real world scenario. For example, to support the world Bradbury has thought up in his book, the Truman Show is also a dystopian novel in which they relate to the brainwashed and controlled society. Though The Truman Show is directed at only Truman, it shows how passive ignorance blindly accepts the information they were given and the dangerous implications of doing so. For example, the people around Truman.

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Some have named Ray Bradbury “the uncrowned king of the science-fiction writers” because of his imagination and beautiful way of making Fahrenheit 451 come to life. The book Fahrenheit 451 is one of the first books to deal with a future society filled with people who have lost their thirst for knowledge and for whom literature is a thing of the past. The author mainly portrays this world from the point of view of Montag, a man who has discovered the power that knowledge contains and is coming to grips with the fact that it is outlawed. However, the reader also gets to see what life is like for one of the people content in living a life lacking in independent thought and imagination through his wife, Millie.

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The author managed to create a dystopian tale accurate enough that it applies to the world fifty years after its creation. Bradbury predicted the evolution of technology, and its social and psychological concequences in a seemingly perfect world. While he predicted all the aspects that makes the modern world dystopian, he failed to observe the positive cultural changes techonology has provided t the modern world. Fahrenheit 451 is very accurate for a book written fifty years back, and it doesn’t fail to predict the cracks that technology were to cause in the world’s social health. Bradbury successfully realizes the decrease in human interaction as technology enters our lives.

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Montag has escaped the city, now free but still in danger of being tracked by scent. He stops at Faber’s home to update him and change clothes. The government instructs the whole city to open their doors, so they can find Montag, an outlaw. Just in time, Montag jumps into the river, which cleanses him of the night’s events. “He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.”

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Amid the 1950s, Bradbury was unbelievably worried about the eventual fate of the United States and what life would resemble for American natives. There were moves by individuals like, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who were instrumental in shaping councils to explore individuals under suspicion of being hostile to American or somehow unsupportive of the standards of the American Dream and the entrepreneur framework in operation in America. Hence, this got to be evident in Bradbury 's tragic future vision of Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit 451 still reverberates with perusers and is loaded with nerves.

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Fahrenheit 451 In a world where society is turned upside down, fireman Guy Montag, whose sole job is to burn books, suddenly feels guilt and curiosity about his unusual job. The dystopian fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, explores a future where books are banned and burned by the government. In our present day, the idea of firefighters burning things instead of putting them out is implausible and hard to imagine. However, the concept of banning books is our reality.

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On page 8, Montag describes his job, “It’s fine work.” (Bradbury) showing his indifference to what he does. Montag continues, “Monday burn Milay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘em to ashes,” (Bradbury 8) which expresses Montag’s careless regard for books. This displays Montag’s apathy towards not only books,

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“Didn’t firemen prevent fires rather than start them up and get the going?” Guy Montag, the protagonist of the story Fahrenheit 451 asks fire chief Beatty. If firemen prevent fires today, what do they do in Fahrenheit 451’s society. This book is about a dystopian society, with a very different, but strangely similar, world to ours. Guy Montag is a fireman.

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Fahrenheit 451 –Analytical Essay There are a few common aspects of the setting of Fahrenheit 451, a book by Ray Bradbury and today’s society. Just like any books being burned in Fahrenheit 451, our government holds certain information as classified and does not let it out to the general public. Both societies use censorship as a way of limiting knowledge. Oversight and surveillance continue to be allowed at an alarming rate and was a part of Bradbury’s concerns. Fitting in and being "normal” or mainstream are not as accepted in either setting.

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At the end of his journey Montag transforms and “Is no longer a fireman but a prophet of humanity” (Zipes). Bradbury’s criticism of a dystopian future finishes as a vision of utopia. A major fault Zipes finds with Bradbury’s critique is that he “doesn’t locate the source of destruction in the state, class society, or technology, but in humankind himself” (Zipes). While Bradbury recognizes the power of the state, he instead shifts the blame of totalitarianism onto human nature, suggesting a form of predestination (Zipes).

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(Bradbury 8). Montag is faced, for the first time, with having to examine his life and if he is actually happy. It destroys his “mask”, allowing him to see the problems of his life, and, more importantly, society. The new perspective “kills” a part of him, the part that was content with his perfect life (having a good,

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