Analysis of Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is, famously, the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns. The world of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a police state where agents of the government, known as “Firemen,” control the populace through the destruction of printed material. Books are publicly burned in spectacular raids on secret caches and libraries maintained by dissident individuals. This burning is a manifestation of censorship and control, a system reinforced by omnipresent radio and television. The narrative of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel charts the trajectory of alienation of Guy Montag, a Fireman who begins to doubt, then oppose, the system of control of which he was once a part. Montag begins to find value in the books he once burned. Ultimately this leads to his estrangement from the Fireman-state, and his exile: he is hunted by the “Mechanical Hound,” a lethal tracking device, while millions in the city watch his flight on television. Montag crosses the river which divides the city from the country, the mechanical from the natural. When the city is destroyed in a nuclear or atomic blast, Montag and the community of men he has found outside the city - each of whom has memorized a book - return to rebuild “civilization.”

In Fahrenheit 451, opposition to the repression and censorship of a dystopian state is focused on books (representing “high culture”), a locus of repression going as far back in the Utopian tradition as Plato's Republic. This is reliant on the preservation of cultural values symbolized by, and contained within, the pages of the books in the Waukegan library frequented by Bradbury in his childhood. The book is, for Bradbury, a repository of those values worth preserving. In a 1967 preface to Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury writes of his “great and abiding love of libraries,” and this, he explains, was the motivation for writing Fahrenheit 451. He writes:

It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. (Bradbury 1967: 11)

Bradbury refers to the Nazi book-burnings rather than the McCarthyite fires contemporaneous with the publication of Fahrenheit 451, but the potency of the images of book-burning cannot have been lost in 1953. The Firemen signify the forces of repression, and Bradbury has himself suggested that he struggled to get “The Fireman,” the novella that is the basis for Fahrenheit 451, published. In 1953, the analogy must have been all too clear. The Fireman-state's abhorrence for books is a symbolic disavowal of the liberal humanist “civilization” also threatened by postwar developments in advertising, mass consumption, and television. In Fahrenheit 451, the “high culture” of the literary canon is the means by which mass culture, television, and state control can be opposed.

Fire and the Fireman-state are metaphors for the growing conformity of American society in the 1950s, and the domination of television, consumerism, and suburban lifestyles, a domination expressed in cultural homogenization. To read ...