Is America Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

Gage Sternberg Mr. Klever English III April 22nd, 2024 Is America Fahrenheit 451? Fahrenheit 451 is a critically acclaimed novel by author Ray Bradbury that throws its readers into a bleak dystopia that may have unsettling parallels to modern society. The story follows a fireman named Montag who burns books for being contraband and citizens are shells of themselves who embody the phrase “ignorance is bliss.” The book essentially warns us that you should use more transition phrases we should actively try to avoid a society like this. As time marches forward, one must question how similar our society is to the depressing dystopia depicted in the book. Modern American society has an alarming amount of parallels with Fahrenheit 451, like our growing indifference towards violence, the increasing mental health crisis, and our strengthening desire for technology.

One of them talks about how annoyed and disgusted they are by their own children before another is asked about her husband in the current war and says, “I’ve never known any dead man killed in a war. Killed jumping off buildings, yes, like Gloria’s husband last week, but from war? No.” (Bradbury 91) Violence and apathy for one another are at an all-time high in the book's universe, but how much different is the real world? K-12 Dive keeps a database of school shootings and in late December of 2023 they reported around 340 shootings in the year alone. “School shootings reached yet another unprecedented high in 2023, outpacing the previous year’s record for the third year in a row.” While this is just one way of expressing violence, the rise in the frequency of shootings and our drying up of media coverage and public outcry is a telling sign we are becoming desensitized to such tragic