The Marxist Lens In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

The Marxist literary lens focuses heavily on the social and economic circumstances in a literary work and how that impacts the characters, plot, and overall message of the story (Delahoyde). This lens is unique because it can focus not only on political structures, but also family and social structures. This lens is beneficial because it shows the basic guiding powers of human society from ancient to current governments and their functions, but it does have drawbacks. One of the biggest drawbacks is that political aspects heavily influence this lens, and it can be difficult for readers with strong political opinions to understand the lens in its entirety without biases. The Marxist lens can be heavily analyzed in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

A comparable lens is the Cultural lens, which is helpful because it allows readers to compare and contrast how cultural aspects influence characters. The Cultural lens is a literary tool used to compare similar components of culture or examine major differences between them. Culture can be defined as how “people live and communicate and how they develop socially, emotionally, historically, and politically”(Rogers 57). This lens is useful when examining historical stories or stories with several cultures mixed, but it can be difficult for readers to use this lens when the book is entirely about their culture or lacks obvious differing cultural aspects. This lens is frequently mistaken for encompassing ideas solely surrounding race, but the lens reveals much more about the true meaning of culture. An autobiography that sheds light on the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII, called They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, shows that the cultural lens is applicable regarding communities. The premise of the book is that Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps because there was a political fear that they had loyalty to Japan, which had just bombed US