Similarities Between 1984 And Fahrenheit 451

As the diplomat Kofi Annan once said, “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.” In the dystopian settings of George Orwell’s 1984, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the motif of rebellion conveys the message that when oppressed by collectivism and censorship, individuals will always seek and find prohibited knowledge, encouraging them to eventually and inevitably break the mold and rebel against a repressive government.

In an oppressive and limited society, individuals will always seek prohibited knowledge to discover the secrets of the unknown and their meanings. In 1984, Winston Smith is curious and suspicious, so he seeks to find more about the past, asking the old man in the bar, “Do you feel that you have more

He believes that they will give him answers about why things are the way they are, and allow him to escape from the controlling

The protagonists in the stories all break the mold of collectivism and do the unthinkable in their societies. In 1984, Winston’s point of irreversible commitment and rebellion is when he meets with O’Brien and pledges his allegiance to The Brotherhood, saying “[We are prepared to do] Anything that we are capable of”(Orwell 172). In saying this, Winston officially picks The Brotherhood over The Party to fight for a more free society. In Fahrenheit 451, Montag, after learning from Faber what life used to be like, fully realizes what society has done to restrict the population and says,“We never burned right…”(Bradbury 113). He meant that instead of burning books and knowledge, they should be burning the dystopian society and whatever it stands for. He then consciously and fully rebels against the government by killing Beatty and fleeing the city. Finally, the same idea of irreversible rebellion as a result of obtaining knowledge is found in Anthem when Equality 7-2521 discovers electricity. He realizes that The Unmentionable Times were more advanced and better than the current society, so he decides to rebel and hide his discovery to improve it, saying, “No single one can possess greater wisdom than the many Scholars … Yet we can. We do. … We forget all men, all laws and all things save our metals and our wires… what care we if we must travel it alone!”(Rand 54).