Life Exposed In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

The book, “Fahrenheit 451”, written by Ray Bradbury expresses a world in which every aspect of life is extremely censored and controlled. Specifically when Captain Beatty goes to Montag’s home and understands that Montag is going through a stressful portion of his life, specifically struggling with his duties and responsibilities of a fireman, he attempts to comfort Montag with an explanation of how life operates and how history has always been this way. This explanation severely distorts the realities of life. A specific instance of this distortion is when Beatty states “Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year”. (Bradbury 58) Beatty

The individual craves for knowledge and to constantly challenge social norms. An individual will ask the hard questions about life in order to attain a higher understand of life. Montag begins to experience this side of him once he meets Faber. Faber is a beacon of knowledge for Montag and shows Montag that there is a totally different part of life that has been severely suppressed by the government of the world in which Fahrenheit 451 exists. Faber explains to Montag, “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that were once in books.”(Bradbury 78) With this explanation he hints that it is not the physical books themselves that are the issues in society but rather that it is the knowledge that the government is afraid of. The knowledge provided by books allows an individual to break the boundaries of modern society and strive to empress new founded concepts upon the

Knowledge is the key to intellectual advancement, which in turn makes a society fluid and constantly changing. A society will go through periods of turmoil and destruction but for the betterment of it. Government fears this concept, as they believe that it will break too far out of proportion and people will begin to challenge authority if they are given too much freedom with their minds. In an effort to change this government severely rescripts the amount of knowledge an individual can consume by censoring all materials seen as threatening to the good of the society. In the world of Fahrenheit 451 the government employs the services of firefighters who destroy all forms of opposition to the overriding cause. People will begin to stop asking the hard questions about life due to the large amounts of resistance put up by the government. To fill the void of information a government will direct the group to other sorts of information that is non-threatening. Such information could be, the amount of corn that Iowa produces or lyrics to a song. When providing a reward that can be easily attained people will tend to flow towards the government’s views and eventually stop intellectual advancement. While this is the case for most of society there will always be a select few who challenge the authority of the government and preserve through hardship in order to attain a