Metathesiophobia In Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury created a wonderful novel that took some of the fears of his time and threw them way into the future. It is amazing how he took problems from the 1950’s and placed them into the future with his novel Fahrenheit 451. This novel was a new science fiction book that many people of the 1950’s could relate to. The way that he was able to make this future so great was because he started with using aspects of his time like, fear of nuclear war, the feeling of helplessness, and a fear of being accused of being a communist but also making it seem like even in the future they will still have some of the same problems of the time. Even though Ray Bradbury used so many details from the time he was able to create an entirely new and unique

Metathesiophobia is the fear of change and this was a prominent thing during the cold war time because communism was a change to what all Americans knew. He is able to hook in readers and make them be able to say “I know how this person feels”. The easiest way to make the reader like a book, is to make it relate to him or her. Anyway, the time period of the 1950’s was very a controversial time for the world and especially the people of the United States. Bradbury's work is a way that people were able to relate to a political view other than their own. During the 1950’s, people feared that speaking out on their political ideas and expressing their thoughts on certain topics could lead to a blacklisting, loss of employment, and maybe assassination. The way these situations relate to Fahrenheit 451 is because all of these things are present in some form or another in the book. People’s fears were less noticeable in the book but one can infer from the book that people do not want any chance of getting in trouble with the government. A great example is when Beatty makes Montag burn down his own house because of the books that Montag own. If Montag didn’t follow Beatty’s order Montag would have killed or blacklisted. A second fear in Fahrenheit 451 that is still in the minds of the people is a full-scale nuclear war (and in the book it is a constant reminder that it had happened

The first example is cars. In the 1950’s cars were large, powerful and fast, how this connect to Fahrenheit 451 is in the book Bradbury talks about “jet cars”(3). For the book the description of these “jet cars”(3) are as very fast and loud. He it talks about street racing when he says “Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured”(28). Street racing was also a popular thing to do in the 50’s. Next, during the 50’s television was becoming a very popular thing to have because one got to see and hear the news instead of just listening to it. In Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury talks about new types of tvs like the “fourth wall-TV” (18) which is a four walled room where each wall is a TV and the wachter feels like they are a participant in whatever they are watching (“Breaking the fourth wall is when a character acknowledges their fictionality, by either indirectly or directly addressing the audience.”(tvtropes.org)) . Billboards were starting to become more effective in the 50’ because more people had cars and were driving. Fahrenheit 451 talks about how billboards had to change so that people could see them as they were rushing past so they made “two-hundred-foot-long billboards”(7). The 1950’s also saw great leaps in medical advancement with vaccines and new equipment. In Fahrenheit 451 a