Alvaro Lizan English 10 Mrs. Arnold

I chose Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury as my book for my independent reading. It is a dystopian fiction book, and the overall theme is the fight between approval and censorship of reading books or expanding one’s knowledge in this fictitious future.

This book made me hesitate and think about this future without books and a complete control of everyone’s mind by TVs and TV shows and the power of commercials to manipulate people, which is not really different from the actual society. Mildred is the best example of control that TVs have in society in the book. And the novel, as I said,can be sort of realistic if we compare the effect or dependence of internet or smartphones on people  in the real society or even the high consummation of TV and the power of commercials.

Another issue in the book which is actually an increasingly problem in our world as well, is the pollution and the destruction of nature.

However, all these problems are way more harmful in the novel that in the actual world, so the writer warns us in some way against falling further in the hole and trying to prevent those issues.

I also think that the reason for the name of the novel (Fahrenheit 451) is pretty interesting. 451 is the number that Montag, the protagonist, wears on his fireman helmet when he is working or specifically, burning books,  and it is also the temperature ( in Fahrenheit) at which paper burns.

The novel is about a future where reading books is the most forbidden thing and firemen start fires to burn books down and the houses of their owners rather than extinguish them. People in this society don’t like having nice conversations with other people, or doing activities in the outside… they are consumed by TVs, they drive really fast and recklessly and there is a lot of pollution. One day, the protagonist of the book, Montag, who is also one of these firemen, meets a seventeen-years old girl who claims to be “crazy”. She and her unusual questions make Montag think about all the books and the situation of the society and finally he realizes how the government controls people’s mind. At the end, he decides to meet his old friend Professor Faber and try to make books come back, but his boss from Montag’s fire department tries to stop him in his fight for independent freedom.

I really liked the protagonist as a professional and a leader, because of his character to make the world change and his professionalism at work time.

I didn’t like his wife as a character though, because her TV wall was everything she cared about and she was also such a depressed and Alexithymic (difficulty in expressing feelings and dysfunction in emotional awareness) woman consumed by sadness and who tries to commit suicide. At the end of the book she calls the alert  to burn her house and runs away from Montag afterwards, expressing no emotional attachment to his husband.

The author’s writing style is interesting, sometimes he does not fully explain what is going on and that makes the story a little bit confusing even though he describes everything perfectly detailed.

He also makes the reader connect with the protagonist. I like Bradbury’s style, however, I think that the plot of the story is such a good idea and it is what makes it unique. So I think that the plot is better rather than the way it’s told.

The novel was set in an American city in sometime in the twenty-fourth century and there have been two atomic wars since 1990.

Fahrenheit 451 is such a good book to concern people about the future that awaits for us and I would totally recommend it.

Multimedia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9n98SXNGl8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL_y6gtxLvQ