Symbolism In Fahrenheit 451, By Ray Bradbury

Literature is the sanctuary for diversity; literature is eternally changing but always the same. Literature is the past, the present, and the future; it is everything and also nothing, it is beauty, it is sorrow, it is obscure but yet it is also lucid. Ray Bradbury, a man of the future, explores all the aspects of literature, and uses each to compel his stories: and behind each story is a truth to be told, a lesson to be learned. Fahrenheit 451, an unheralded tail of a dystopian future, is developed from the knowledge all men have but most men neglect: that if man disregards the lessons of history, he is bound to the same fate as those of the past. Therefore, Ray Bradbury utilizes symbolism in his writing in order to develop the concept of

For instance, when Clarisse McClellan said, "I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers because they never see them slowly. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He’d say that’s grass! A pink blur? That’s a rose garden", she is describing societies blindness to reality. In this quote, it is clear that Bradbury is using speed to symbolize the roots of the ignorance of man. In a sense, Bradbury is implying that as time has progressed, man no longer attempts to understand the world and the materials of the world, but instead, only understand the world for what is comprehended by the eye. As the book progresses, the venom of lies that is in Montag’s mind is numbed, and in return, Montag’s natural way of thinking is restored: this is when Montag delivers an important line, “We've started two atomic wars since 1990!” (Bradbury 73). Though at a glance, this line does not mean much, but one can infer that Montag is actually explaining the importance of history, which returns to the central concept of learning from the achievements and the failures of the past. Additionally, by saying this, Montag is actually stressing the importance of books, and that if society took an extra minute to learn about the past, society would realize the errors in their

“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we're got on damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation” (Bradbury 146). These lines may be some of the most essential lines of Fahrenheit 451 because it explains that though man may be stubborn, there is still hope for man in the future; that if even one man grasps the lessons of the past, more will join and eventually man will no longer burst into flames and need to start