“In the old days you could tell who was home by seeing if the lights were on; now you knew who was home by seeing who had their lights off. The televisions were small and the pictures were in black and white and you needed to turn off the light to get a good picture.” (Bradbury xiii) When televisions were invented they were the next big thing, and people were never off of it so books became more and more unpopular and the government eventually banned books and if you read a book, a piece of machinery called ‘The Hound” would alert the fireman and if the person ran away the hound would chase after them and kill them. The government was basically controlling them because they would monitor what television shows were on and the hound was something …show more content…
In this book, firefighters are not any ordinary firefighters; instead of putting out the fires they start them on, only two things, houses and books. Books are banned from society by the government, and people are now distracted by “parlor walls’ or, in some teenagers cases, races or Fun Parks. Parlor walls are TVs built into the walls and costs you $2,000 to broadcast entertainment and news that are checked by the government. He likes the job until he meets his new neighbor, Clarisse McClellan, who is an “anti-social” seventeen year old. In other people’s minds she is antisocial because she doesn’t like things other people like, but to her she is social because her definition of social is talking about things that others don’t think twice about, like how strange the world is.(Bradbury 27) In addition, Clarisse asks Montag, “Have you ever read any of the books you burn?” And he laughs responding that it’s against the law and says, “It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn them to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.” (Bradbury 6) Clarisse asks more questions that Montag never stopped to think of, so he …show more content…
And he gets scared because he hid books he stole from the places where the firemen burned houses. And if the hound found out it would kill him. The next day, he goes to work and the alarm rings and they go to the house and he sees his own house. He asks Beatty if his wife and friends rang the alarm, and Beatty say that her friends did then she did. After, Beatty makes him burn down his house he turns and kills Beatty with the blaze. After he looks like a “charred wax figure,” he runs away from the hound chasing after him. After he escapes he goes to Faber’s house and he sets trail to the city. (Bradbury 111-158) In conclusion, the government controls the populous by jobs and machinery. If the government didn’t have the firefighters everyone would just secretly read books, same with the hound. And they check what’s on television just in case someone saw something that could influence them to read or do something bad and they would be able to stop them. I would say that the government had a big say in what the population does and everything is guarded so that things go the governments