Ignorance In Fahrenheit 451, By Louis Lowry

494 Words2 Pages

Remember when you were a kid and the only thing that mattered was that ice cream cone that you were about to get? Oh to be young and ignorant! Nonetheless, knowledge can affect society. What’s more, is that it is considered that ignorance can positively impact society. On the contrary, ignorance negatively affects society. This is questioned in the books Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and the book The Giver by Louis Lowry when knowledge is viewed as a threat to society making ignorance ethical.

To start with, in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury it is very explicit that knowing can affect society. In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist Guy Montag has a conversation with his neighbor Clarisse where she mentions something about her parents and uncle staying up to talk, but Montag was taken aback not understanding what there was to talk about. According to the text, “Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell you?-for being a pedestrian. Oh, we're most peculiar…But what do you talk about?"(Bradbury 7). The fact that Montag was puzzled about conversing with each other about life proves that knowledge affects …show more content…

In the book The Giver, Jonas asks his dad if he loves him and he gets told that he needs to watch the way he asks questions. So his dad simply replies by saying that he enjoys Jonas’s presence, showing that ignorance protects Jonas from getting hurt after getting told that his dad doesn’t necessarily love him. The Giver states, “Do you love me? asked Jonas ………… Precision of language!..... You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me? The answer is yes.” (Lowry 127). This proves that ignorance is useful to keep society under control, also preventing people from doing irrational things after getting hurt. On the contrary, ignorance can also be seen as something that negatively affects