Fahrenheit 451: A Book Review

Depths of Pentecost ^ | November 10, 2018 | Philip Cottraux

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Fahrenheit 451: A Book Review

By Philip Cottraux

I’ve written two reviews of dystopian future novels, 1984 and Brave New World (click the links to read). This week I decided to tackle Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The story behind its authorship is almost as fascinating as the book itself; it took years for Bradbury to complete, working feverishly in garages and library basements during his spare time (he admitted in the book’s epilogue that he never quite completed a final story). Although written during the backdrop of the Cold War, it proved to be one of the most prophetic books I‘ve ever read.

I pondered during my Brave New World whether it or 1984 was a more accurate vision of the future. While Orwell’s novel is darker and more violent, Brave New World may actually be more disturbing in how cheerfully it describes a future where the oppressive government rules by making genetically bred people dependent on sex, drugs, and mindless entertainment.

However, after reading Fahrenheit 451, I’m now considering that the future is sort of a weird mixture of all three. We don’t really live in an age dominated by Orwell, Huxley, or Bradbury singularly; but different aspects of each’s dire warnings are becoming today’s sad realities. Certain words leapt off the page as something happening in the real world. Consider this explanation for why books are illegal: “Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lung? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.” Amazing that as I read this, The Simpsons, a show that used to pride itself as controversial, just wrote out the Apu character so as not to offend.

If 1984 is about rule through terror and Brave New World is about rule through manipulation and dependence, Fahrenheit 451 is about rule through censorship. It takes place at an unspecified date in the future. Our protagonist, Montag, is a fireman. But in this world, his job is not to put out fires but to arrest anyone caught with books, then burn the books (the reference to great book burnings of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia is pretty obvious).

Montag seems content with his life at first. But something is off. He comes home to a cookie-cutter home and a cookie-cutter wife, Mildred, who watches 4-dimensional television where generic sitcoms are formulated to exactly what she wants to see. A perfect story with a snappy one-liner at the end, every time. Life is so perfect that it’s hollow. No one seems to have any independent personality, no curiosity about life or its meaning. Mildred is addicted to sleeping pills but can’t remember taking them in the morning.

Montag’s journey is sparked by meeting a peculiar 17-year old neighbor named Clarisse. Unlike everyone else, she is curious about the world and loves to explore nature. She isn’t interested in television and is an outcast at school. As they talk before he goes to work every day, she tells him old family stories he’s never heard. That there once was a time where books were read and firemen put out fires.

*Spoiler alert in case you haven’t read the book.* While Montag’s friendship with Clarisse causes him to realize his own dissatisfaction, the girl dies mysteriously at the end of the first act. We never learn what happened to her, but it’s implied she was arrested and executed while the disappearance was covered up as an accident. Many readers expressed to Bradbury their love for the character and hoped she would reappear heroically at the end in some kind of twist. Bradbury admitted he was tempted to resurrect her in some revisions to the manuscript. Personally, I think for the sake of the story, he made the right decision. Clarisse’s death and the world’s indifference elevates the sense of tragedy and fits the book’s grim environment.

At the station, the fire chief, Beatty, can detect Montag beginning to question his work. So he sits him down in his office and explains the whole story, and here we get our exposition on the back story of this hopeless world. Ultimately, books were banned because they challenge people. They contain philosophy and history and poetry that makes us ponder the meaning of life. They tell us truths about ourselves that make us uncomfortable. And in the future, as people become more dependent on technology, they really don’t like being uncomfortable. They don’t want to feel sadness or gain perspective (in this world, once one dies their body is immediately incinerated and their families don’t mourn but immediately forget they ever existed).

Another critical moment occurs when the fire department is called to their latest emergency book burning. They find an elderly woman with a house full of books who refuses to leave even as they’ve doused her home with kerosene. Despite a desperate attempt to remove her, she lights it herself, letting the flames engulf her. What was in these books that was so important, she would die before allowing them to be taken from her? In an impulsive act, Montag had taken a book from her hoard before the fatal act. Knowing the crime he’s committed, he sneaks it home. It turns out to be a copy of the Bible.

Some time beforehand, Montag had met an old man in a park named Faber, who was a professor years ago. Looking for answers, he tracks the elderly scholar down who explains to him what the book’s meaning. Faber lives in hiding with the constant guilt over standing idly by while books were banned and his profession was declared criminal decades ago. He and Montag begin an elaborate plan to start printing books underground, avoiding detection by the authorities, knowing that as long as they still exist somewhere, there’s still hope for humanity.

But Mildred finds the book at his home and turns him in to the authorities. While she escapes in a daze, Beatty cruelly forces Montag to handle the flamethrower that will destroy his house and all the books he’s been hiding. Once it’s all in ashes, Beatty attempts to arrest him. But with nothing to lose and a fit of blind rage, Montag turns the flame thrower on his fire chief, incinerating him alive. Now on the run as a murderer, there’s a harrowing chase scene ending with him narrowly escaping in a river before being swept away by the current. Out in the countryside, far away from the city, he finds abandoned railroad tracks and a camp of hobos lit by a campfire. But these refugees, like Faber, are actually part of a vast nationwide network of former professors who have all been quietly waiting in hiding. They’ve been able to avoid detection by memorizing books. Once civilization falls, they hope to begin republishing thousands of years of human knowledge with the hope that humanity’s future lies with wisdom from his past.

They don’t have to wait long. The entire tale is set against the backdrop of an impending war. Warplanes and jets often skyrocket overhead, interrupting the story. Tensions between the US and a sinister unnamed foreign power are touted on the news in the background (remember this book was written during the 1950‘s). At the very end, Montag watches with horror as cities are wiped out in an apocalyptic bombing. His wife and Faber are certain among the dead. But with civilization now in flames, he and the hobos can emerge from hiding and lead mankind to a new dawn (Montag is German for “Monday“). Despite an overwhelmingly grim tone, the book actually has a hopeful ending.

At the surface, Fahrenheit 451 is a warning against censorship. However, there’s a deeper subtext. While 1984 and Brave New World completely villainised the authoritarian government, Bradbury places the blame on society itself. The oppressors only carried out what the people wanted. It was the consumer who started feeling uncomfortable with the information in books and like spoiled babies crying to their mothers, demanded the government do something about it.

Consider this quote from Beatty: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca…It didn’t come from the government down. There as no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time….”

In 2018, controversy is to be avoided at all costs. Everything has to be safe. No minorities can be offended by anything in media; of course, the definition of “minorites” has been expanded not just to include race, but has gone down a rabbit hole of cisgendered munchkins or Muslims who identify as dolphins. What would be considered a joke five years ago is now fascist reality, because it’s impossible to produce anything without offending someone, even an ethnic group you didn’t even know existed. The outrage culture can never be appeased; and the ultimate goal is power, not equality.

Today, media can be fine-crafted to whatever you want. This encourages confirmation bias, which further isolates people into their own bubbles. Want to hear only conservative or liberal outlooks? There’s plenty of options for you to keep unwanted pespectives out of your mind. You can trap yourself in an echo chamber of opinions you already agree with without ever applying critical thinking.

The consequences of this tribalism are terrifying. For example, we now have a growing movement of people convinced the earth is flat. What started as a joke on 4Chan has become an actual serious group convinced that they’ve made the greatest scientific discovery in history, that NASA has concocted a cockamamie scheme to fool the human race into thinking the earth is round (never mind that humanity figured out the global model thousands of years ago).

How could people be so adamant about something so silly and easy to disprove? Bradbury has the answer: echo chambers created by confirmation bias. Believe whatever you want to believe. Just get on Google, search “proof the earth is flat,” and voila! You have thousands of articles written by pseudo-scientists to convince you of whatever you want to believe. You can reach your conclusion before you ever falsify your hypothesis. You can block people who point out to you where you’re wrong and hit the like button on comments agreeing with you. Truth doesn’t matter, only the delusion. Remember O’Brien’s words to Winston in the final act of 1984: “The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them.”

As Bradbury predicted, our entertainment options have expanded from books to radio to movies to television to now include the internet and social media. But the more diverse our methods of communication, the more we embrace mindless comforts and despise ancient wisdom. A generation was raised to believe they have a right to never be uncomfortable. And social media giants like Facebook encourage this by banishing conservative or religious thought. People who attack the system are gone, replaced by videos of cute puppies.

But censorship only exacerbates a brutal universal truth; discomfort is good for you. Being challenged makes you stronger. Just like strain on your muscles makes you more fit, pressure on your mindset makes you more philosophically sound. Hardship is a fundamental reality of life, and learning should scare you. We should be terrified when we read philosophers and authors from the past because they expose that human then is the same as today. But the answer is not to cry and stick your head in a hole like an ostrich; it’s to confront your inner demons and become a better person.

And without that confrontation, nobody will be a better person.

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You’re welcome! Glad you enjoyed it.