Introduction

Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous and popular novels ever written that are of a literary genre known as dystopias. The term dystopia is derived from Utopia, the word that Thomas More utilized for the title of his novel from the 16th century portraying an ideal society. In any case, PlatosRepublic is generally considered to be the earliest work of its type the 4th-century BC,which has in common with the government of Bradburys novel a deep suspicion of literature as disturbing and subversive. Plato points out that if the great epic poet Homer were to arrive in his ideal city, he should crown him with laurels, congratulate him on his achievements, and send him on his waymuch less harsh than burning him to death, but depicting a similar determination to control the thoughts of citizens and ban the free play of the imagination.The reason I chose this specific topic is the predictive parallel I would like to depict and which Bradbury made in his novel, having both Utopia and Dystopia as indicators of societys status quo.The fact that stresses me the most as an intellectual and a social being is that before the age of television people actually sat around chatting and enjoying each others company, which is depicted as a fantasy in the book. The paper depicts both sides of the medal, as well as the transition from Utopia to Dystopia in the novel, as seen by Montag, the novel protagonist.Although Bradbury has said that the book-burnings inFahrenheit 451were inspired by the 1933 Nazi book-burnings, he was much more likely inspired by the censorship that accompanied the Red Scare of his own era.The Red Scare (1950) period was most memorably exemplified by Senator Joseph McCarthys vicious, irresponsible crusade against supposed communists and communist sympathizers which included attempts to remove suspect books from public libraries. This was also the period of the Hollywood blacklist, with many actors, directors, and screenwriters being banned from working on Hollywood films or television.

The 1950 was the year that television became a truly mass-culture phenomenon in the United States. People would visit friends simply to sit - or stand, if there werent enough chairs to go around - and stare mesmerized at the glowing little box for hours. To some people it seemed to portend the death of civilized discourse, literacy, and individualism. Among these was Ray Bradbury.

Utopia and dystopia in Fahrenheit 451 and other great works of fiction

As we reflect onFahrenheit 451as a piece of dystopian fiction, a common definition for both terms "dystopia" and "utopia" is required.Dystopiais often used as an antonym of "utopia," a perfect world often imagined existing in the future. Therefore, dystopia is a terrible and paradoxical place. Most commonly cited as the model of a twentieth-century dystopian novel is Yevgeny Zamiatin'sWe(1924), which envisions an oppressive but stable social order accomplished only through the complete effacement of the individual.We, which may more properly be called an anti-utopian work rather than a dystopian work, is often cited as the precursor of George Orwell's (his pen name)1984, a nightmarish vision of a totalitarian world of the future, similar to one portrayed inWe, in which terrorist force maintains order. Nineteen Eighty-Four may be by far the best known dystopian novel is,written in 1948 and published in June of 1949. Weand1984are often cited as classic dystopian fictions, along with Aldous Huxley'sBrave New World(1932), which, contrary to popular belief, has a somewhat different purpose and object of attack than the previously mentioned novels. Huxley'sBrave New Worldhas as its target representations of a blind faith in the idea of social and technological progress. It depicts a society in which human beings are treated like different model cars trundling off the Ford assembly line as drudges or as self-indulgent but loveless upper-class mindless twits hooked on orgies and drugs.In contrast to dystopian novels like Huxley's and Orwell's, however, Bradbury'sFahrenheit 451does not picture villainous dictators (like Orwell's O'Brien) or corrupt philosopher-kings (like Huxley's Mustapha Mond), although Bradbury's Captain Beatty shares a slight similarity to Mustapha Mond. The crucial difference is that Bradbury's novel does not focus on a ruling elite nor does it portray a higher society, but rather, it portrays the means of oppression and regimentation through the life of an uneducated and complacent, though an ultimately honest and virtuous, working-class hero (Montag). In contrast, Orwell and Huxley choose to portray the lives of petty bureaucrats (Winston Smith and Bernard Marx, respectively), whose alienated lives share similarities to the literary characters of author Franz Kafka.Whereas Huxleys citizens were amused into mindlessness, Orwells are treated much more brutally, with torture and murder of dissidents being commonplace. In this novel, unlike Huxleys, loveless sex is a means of protest; and endless, inescapable television propaganda broadcasts have replaced reading. In Orwells culture television is a two-way tool which watches the citizens even more intently than the citizens watch it. He never really explains how everyone can be spied on so intently without at least one half of the population watching the other half. The improbability of this arrangement is typical of dystopias, which seldom strive to create plausible portraits of a degraded future culture, but instead exaggerate certain tendencies in order to isolate and highlight them.

Plenty of similarity exists between these works. All three imagine a technocratic social order maintained through oppression and regimentation and by the complete effacement of the individual. All these authors envision a population distracted by the pursuit of explicit images, which has the effect of creating politically debilitated individuals.Huxley envisions a World State in which war has been eradicated in order to achieve social stability; Bradbury and Orwell imagine that war itself achieves the same end by keeping the population cowering in fear of an enemy attack, whether the enemy is real or not. The war maintains the status quo because any change in leaders may topple the defense structure. Orwell and Bradbury imagine the political usefulness of the anesthetization of experience: All experiences become form without substance. The population is not able to comprehend that all they do is significant and has meaning Likewise, Bradbury and Huxley imagine the use of chemical sedatives and tranquilizers as a means of compensating for an individual's alienated existence. More importantly, all three authors imagine a technocratic social order accomplished through the suppression of books that is, throughcensorship.Censorship suggests that many different factors could combine to create this result. These factors can be broken into two groups: factors that lead to a general lack of interest in reading and factors that make people actively hostile toward books. The novel doesnt clearly distinguish these two developments. Apparently, they simply support one another.Caches of books, when discovered, are burned by firemen whose job is eradicating print. Socialization has been reduced to group television viewings, and creativity narrowed into brief moments in shows when the audience is prompted to respond to the virtual events they are witnessing, and which absorb them far more than the real world around them.

The first group of factors includes the popularity of competing forms of entermainment such as TV and radio. More broadly, Bradbury thinks that the presence of fast cars, loud music,and advertisements creates a lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has the time to focus. Also, the huge mass of published material is too overwhelming to think about, leading to a society that reads condensed books (which were very popular at the time Bradbury was writing) rather thanthe real thing.The second group of factors, those that make people hostile toward books, involves envy. People do not like to feel inferior to those who have read more than they have. But the novel implies that the most important factor that leads to censorship is the objections of special-interest groups and minorities to things in books that offend them. Bradbury is careful to refrain from referring specifically to racial minorities. Beatty mentioned dog lovers and cat lovers, for example. The reader can only try to infer which special-interest group he really had in mind. However, despite their similarities, you can also draw a crucial distinction between these books. If the failure of theproles(citizens of the lowest class; workers) reveals Orwell's despair at the British working-class political consciousness, and if Mustapha Mond reveals Huxley's cynical view of the intellectual, Guy Montag's personal victory over the government system represents American optimism. This train of thought leads back to Henry David Thoreau, whoseCivil DisobedienceBradbury must hold in high esteem. Recall the remark by Juan Ramon Jimenez that serves as an epigraph toFahrenheit 451: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." This epigraph could have easily served as Thoreau's motto and is proof of Bradbury's interest in individual freedom. Bradbury's trust in the virtue of the individual and his belief in the inherently corrupt nature of government is a central concept ofFahrenheit 451.[footnoteRef:1] [1: http://www.cliffsnotes.com]

Continuing Bradbury's inspection of personal freedom inFahrenheit 451, you must first examine the freedoms that the author gives to the characters. As mentioned previously, you know that all sense of past was obliterated by the entrance of technology (the TV characters give citizens the opportunity to create a past and present through their story lines). Likewise, through the use of TV, individuals do not understand the importance of the past in their own lives. They have been repeatedly given propaganda about the past, so they have no reason to question its authenticity or value.Also, because of the technology the characters are given, no one (of course, except for Faber, Granger, Clarisse, and eventually Montag) understands the value of books in direct relation to their own personal development. Television, for the majority of individuals inFahrenheit 451, does not create conflicting sentiments or cause people to think, so why would they welcome challenge? As Millie points out to Montag, "Books aren't people. You read and I look all around, but there isn'tanybody! . . . My 'family' is people. They tell me things: I laugh, they laugh. . . ."[footnoteRef:2] [2: Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, pg 34. Paperback, January 10, 2012]

Because the majority of this dystopian society is not able to express personal freedom, it is interesting that Clarisse and the unidentified old woman die early in the novel in order to display what has happened so far in this society to the people who exercise their personal freedom. It's also important to see that even Millie, who serves as the model of this society's conformity, almost dies as a result of her one act of personal rebellion when she attempts suicide. Likewise, perhaps even Captain Beatty's demise is an act of personal freedom because Beatty goads Montag into killing him instead of protecting himself and remaining alive.The battle of having personal freedom is essential in this book because Bradbury demonstrates what happens when man is not given the opportunity to express his thoughts or remember his past. Through Clarisse, the unidentified woman, Millie, and Beatty, you are shown the consequences of what happens when humans aren't allowed to fully express their individuality and choice (death). Through the characters of Montag, Faber, and Granger, you can see how one individual can make a difference in society if that one individual can fully realize the importance of his or her past, as well as be willing to fight for the opportunity to express himself or herself.

It is easy to see why the book was warmly received when it was published in 1953. The prosperity of post-war America created a mass culture of vast complacency which valued conformity and blandness. The edginess which Bradburys beloved science fiction, horror, and fantasy featured was suspect. There were plenty of voices raised in protest, celebrating nonconformity, individualism, and creativity; and a large number of these voices belonged to science fiction writers.One of the most striking characteristics of the novel to be frequently overlooked is its setting in an era of recurrent atomic war. In 1950, when Bradbury was writing, the Russians had just the previous year exploded their first atomic bomb, making real the nuclear arms race that had only been fantasized before. The first thermonuclear weapon was not to be tested for another year, though Bradbury depicts a society which has already weathered two atomic wars. As in Orwells novel, there are suggestions that this state of war is designed to preserve the supremacy of the tyrannical regime which governs this dystopia. A final apocalyptic nuclear exchange at the end of the novel marks its fall, but it is so briefly and distantly described that most readers entirely forget about it, as they forget about the much more vividly depicted annihilation of Earth by nuclear war inThe Martian Chronicles.Both of these are instances of what I like to call musculardisarmament,[footnoteRef:3] in which one final cataclysmic war is depicted as preparing the way for an era of peace and enlightenment. One of the earliest examples was H. G. Wells 1914 novelThe World Set Freein whichas the title suggestsatomic weapons clear the ground for the emergence of a utopia. Bradbury doesnt go that far, but clearly the holocaust at the end of the novel is meant to be more cheering than horrifying. We are also expected to sympathize with Montags murder of Beatty with the flamethrower. Stories like these are the intellectuals equivalent of gory computer games in which players can take out their frustrations on imaginary foes by blasting them to bits. When we think about the essential image of Bradbury we remember the scenes he evokes of sitting on the porch sipping lemonade and listening to the hum of cicadas and forget the fictional mayhem he sometimes inflicts on the people he disdains. [3: https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/451.htm]

It is also easy to see whyFahrenheit 451would seem especially timely today. Thanks to the Patriot Act, government agents secretly track the reading habits of citizens based on the books they borrow from libraries. Web technology makes it possible to go even further, and determine what sites people are browsing. It is not uncommon to hear of the electronic trails left by Web browsers being introduced as evidence in trials.We have robot dogs and execution by lethal injection, though we have not yet combined the two. But we identify criminals by their unique DNA signatures much as the Hound of the novel identifies them by their unique smell.Modern anti-depressants are often more effective than the tranquilizers taken by Montags wife, but her zombie-like state is all too familiar. Depression is so common and widely discussed today that she no longer seems as bizarre as Bradbury probably intended her to be.American popular culture has always been profoundly anti-elitist and anti-intellectual, and that has not changed. A president who tells us students must be held to higher standards himself makes no effort to exemplify intellectual curiosity or profundity. All these are reasons that Bradburys novel resonates with contemporary readers. However, it is worth noting the ways in which our world differs from that ofFahrenheit 451.We have our big-screen TVs, some of them approaching wall size; but increasingly we refuse to be passive recipients of what the networks want to hand out. We Tivo our favorite shows and skip past the commercials, infuriating the sponsors. DVD technology lets us view the films we want when we want. The mass quality of mass communications is eroding, and the television network executives and advertisers are growing frantic as they see the impending end of an era. Television viewing, though still consuming a huge amount of our leisure time, is actually declining as people spend more time playing video games or using the Web. The Internet is notoriously the greatest innovation that science fiction failed to anticipate, and it is far more anarchic, individualized, and unregulated than the mass media which preceded it and which shaped the nightmares of earlier dystopian writers.

The Internet has also helped to reverse in some measure the decline in reading. The classics Bradbury cites as endangered in his novel are all available for reading or downloading via the Webthough the foreign ones are usually available only in dated public-domain translations. On the Web the classics are more accessible than contemporary fiction and poetry, which remain locked in limited-circulation books and magazines.The seashells that people insert in their ears today are ear buds through which people listen to highly individualized playlists of songs on their devices, and they can even listen to an audio study guide forThe Martian Chronicles,though the novel itself doesnt seem to be available yet for downloading from the iTunes Store or some other famous and consumerist medium.

CONCLUSION

In modern days and society, we see technology (mostly led by consumerism) entertaining in the same way as seashells in Fahrenheit 451, home cinema systems play the function of parlour walls and electronic literature is usurping the traditional paperback. There is no more need to feel the scent of an old book, whereas everything has been digitalized and hard copy books and literature are replaced with electronic ones. We come to wonder, is Bradburysdystopic prediction the one we are living in now, or are we that close? I am at this moment capable of sharing my personal opinion without being ostracized (well, not entirely), incarcerated, or even incinerated along with my words for doing so. But for how long?What is an everyday sight is a generation of young people which has grown up mostly text-messaging, blogging, social networking and creating Web sites online for whom reading and writing are constant, natural activities. Much of the prose they generate and read is appalling by traditional standards, but it is not just the passive consumption of images that Bradbury envisioned. The problem with dystopias and other cautionary forms is that their exaggeration can cause us to become complacent because things just arent as bad as the novels predicted. But so long as we read them thoughtfully and thoroughly, understanding that they are meant to point us toward problems rather than accurately foretelling the future, they can still inspire us to work for a world which, if not utopian, is a lot better than our worst nightmares.