Ignorance In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

As I picked up the critically acclaimed book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, I was surprised at how similar the book’s dystopian society is to the world nowadays. These days, people who enjoy reading books are rare, because we are ignorant to the true knowledge in them. Similarly, the book portrays how in their dystopian society, ignorance is key and knowing too much or straying from the crowd is dangerous. With Montag as the protagonist and one of the only characters to question his society, I realized how ignorance is harmful in society, including our current one and the one portrayed in Fahrenheit 451. In the beginning, Montag does not even know how ignorant his society is. It is first brought to his attention when he meets a strange girl who asks about his life as a fireman. He begins to doubt his life when the girl asks, “Are you happy?” and he can only answer in sudden outrage, “Am I what” (Bradbury 10)? Montag’s shocked response at the sudden question can only indicate that he is not happy. Because he is ignorant to his unhappiness, he

She is always using the latest technology and rarely shows her emotions. However, even if she lives in a technological shell, she is unsatisfied with her life. Coming home from work one evening, Montag finds Mildred lying next to “[a] small crystal bottle of sleeping tablets which earlier today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in the light of the tiny flame” (Bradbury 13). Because she tried to commit suicide, readers can tell that Mildred is unhappy with her life. She uses technology as an escape for the pain she is going through, although it does not help because she still tried to commit suicide. Her ignorance only makes her problems worse, because she has no knowledge to use to solve them. Like her husband, not knowing the cause of the problems because of ignorance make it impossible to find a