Fahrenheit+451+SF

= Fahrenheit 451 =

Participation Wiki by Sean-F-WHS
"Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean."

Author Bio
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, IL on 22 August 1920. A large influence on his life was his Aunt Neva, who encouraged him to be imaginative and took him to plays. When he was 12, he saw a magician called Mr. Electrico performing at a carnival. After seeing the magician, he spent many hours per day writing stories. In 1934, his family moved to Arizona and then to Los Angeles. In 1938, he graduated from a high school in Los Angeles. After graduation, he wanted to join the military, but he was not able to because of his poor eyesight. His education did not extend past high school, and from 1938 to 1942, he sold newspapers on street corners in L.A. In his spare time, he went to the library or wrote. In 1943, he took up a full-time profession of writing. He wrote short stories for periodicals, and he assembled and published a collection of them in 1947 called //Dark Carnival//. He would soon earn his reputation as a writer who envisioned the future.

His first lengthy work was titled //The Martian Chronicles//, and it was published in 1950. It depicts human attempts to set up a colony on Mars. After that, a book called //The Illustrated Man// was published. Then came //Fahrenheit 451// in 1953. This is considered by many to be the cornerstone of Bradbury's work. He has also written many other works, including //The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes,// and //Quicker Than the Eye//. His works have earned numerous awards, and many of them have been adapted into play or movie form, along with being adapted for the television program, //The Twilight Zone//.

In 1947, Bradbury married a woman named Maggie. They lived in Los Angeles with many cats. They raised 4 daughters and have 8 grandchildren. Maggie died in November 2003.

Bradbury is still alive and still writing. Although he suffered from a stroke in 1999, he recovered from it. He received the National Book Award in 2000, and he published a new novel in 2001, titled //From the Dust Returned//.

[|Source 1] [|Source 2]

Plot Synopsis
//Fahrenheit 451// depicts a future world in which books are censored and thought is stifled. The firemen in the book do not put out fires, but they instead set books on fire. Guy Montag is one of these firemen. His duty, like that of other firemen, is to censor out books by setting them on fire with a kerosene-spraying nozzle. He enjoys his job, and cannot think of doing anything different. However, he meets a girl, Clarisse McClellan, who changes everything.

She introduces Montag to a past that he does not know: the past where people could read and think freely, the past where firemen put out fires instead of starting them, a past that resembles how she and her family are currently living in their home and are wishing to bring back for everyone.

However, Montag's wife, Mildred, is the complete opposite of Clarisse and her family. She rarely thinks, and we are first introduced to her when she is poisoned from taking too many sleeping pills (a product of her lack of thought). She has her stomach and blood pumped out and filtered. She spends her time listening to Seashell radios, which are tiny radios that look something like soundproof wireless earbuds. They fit in one's ears, and are in reality just something made in order to stifle thinking and interaction with others. Also, she likes to "interact" with her "family", a set of animated people that "live" in giant TV screens that cover the entire wall in the "TV parlor". This is just another anti-thinking and anti-interaction device. When Montag is called one night to go burn a house down, he decides to steal one of the books from the house. Right after that, it is revealed to the reader that Montag has a rather large collection (about a dozen) of books hidden in his air conditioner. One of these books is the Bible, which is very rare, if not impossible to find in the world of this novel. However, the captain of the firehouse, named Beatty, gets suspicious of him and pays a visit to his house. The captain later sends the Mechanical Hound to his house. The Mechanical Hound is a spider-like killing machine used to hunt down people that are known to have books, pounce on them, and kill them with a euthanasia needle. However, Montag evades the Hound.

Because he has a Bible, he wants to get in touch with an expert on books. Therefore, he contacts Faber, an old man that he met in the park a few years back. He goes to Faber's house and tells him about his find. Faber gives him a small, Seashell-like device that they can use to communicate back and forth. However, Montag ends up blowing his cover by taking out and reading a book of poetry to some of Mildred's friends when they come over for a visit. Very soon after that, Beatty and some other firemen, along with the Mechanical Hound, come to Montag's house to deal with him and his books. They hand him a flamethrower and tell him to start burning. Will Montag escape and finally be able to read freely? Or, will he become a martyr to the lost cause of literature and thought? If you want to know, read the book!

Literary Information

 * Genre: Dystopian fiction; science fiction
 * Symbolism Used:
 * Fire- Censorship and destruction
 * Montag and Faber- a brand of paper and a brand of pencil- symbolizes how the two characters Montag and Faber must work together to succeed.
 * Phoenix- rebirth from fire: what the government in the book is trying to do to society through book-burning
 * Important Characters:
 * Montag- A fireman who is inspired to rebel against censorship by Clarisse. He wants to bring back free thought. He ends up stealing books from the houses he is about to burn in his job.
 * Clarisse McClellan- a teenager whowould be a normal, thinking person in our world, but is a sort of "odd duck" in the book's world. She inspires Montag to rebel.
 * Mildred: Montag's wife. She is fully engrossed in the thought-stifling activities of listening to Seashell Radios and watching the "walls".
 * Beatty: the firehouse captain. He is dedicated to the destruction of books. He eventually figures out what Montag is doing.
 * The Mechanical Hound: the fire department's fear device. It is designed to smell out, hunt down, and kill free thinkers and book owners. It is a spider-like, nearly indestructible robot that dispatches its prey using large doses of drugs.
 * Themes
 * People resent those that are more intelligent.
 * Thinking, talking, and reading are being crowded out by other media.
 * The government can end up controlling the people if they want it to.
 * Fear can be used to gain cooperation or the appearance of cooperation.

Literary Analysis
Bradbury's style in //Fahrenheit 451// is very interesting. He makes use of much figurative language and unconventional punctuation and sentence structure. He uses these to provide images or to create feelings.

Bradbury uses figurative language heavily in the book. He especially uses it in the first section of the book, titled "The Hearth and the Salamander" (3-68). One example of this figurative language occurs when Bradbury describes the unconscious form of Mildred lying on the bed after she overdosed on sleeping pills. He described her eyes as "Two moonstones [that] looked up at [Montag] with a small fire" (13) and her face as "a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall" (13). In addition, he described Clarisse's eyes as "two shining drops of bright water" (7).

Bradbury uses unconventional punctuation and sentence structure as well. He uses them in order to enhance the feel of the sentences as they are read. To create the feeling that time is flying by, he uses this unconventional punctuation: "One two three four five six seven days: the firehouse." (31) .Note the lack of commas, which keeps the reader from pausing in the middle of the sentence. Another example discusses Montag's thoughts as the rain is falling. It shows the chaotic state of Montag's life at the moment. This is an excerpt from it, as the paragraph itself is very long: "One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, sleeping tablets, men disposable tissue, coattails, blow, wad, flush" (18). The polysyndeton shows the chaos.

Bradbury uses language in interesting ways. He creates feeling and mental images with his use of figurative language and unconventional sentence structure. His style of writing adds greatly to the book.

Criticism __** SPOILER ALERT!!!!! **__
I think that the book, //Fahrenheit 451//, was very well written. The author communicated the idea of dystopian society very well. He effectively showed how horrible a world without thought can be. He expresses this well through his descriptions of the conditions in the society, what the people do for recreation, and how the non-thinking citizens react to Montag, who does think. In addition, the author uses suspense well, especially in the scene where Montag is being chased by the Mechanical Hound towards the end. Overall, the book is very well-written.

However, I would have liked to see a more conclusive ending or even a sequel. The ending really does not say anything about what happens to the "book people" when Montag meets up with them. It is never identified whether they get their books physically written down or if they do not. In addition, it is not specified whether or not they have to stay in hiding. Although this ending is designed to make the reader think, I would have preferred the ending to be more conclusive, like that of //1984//. This would provide a greater impact on the reader in my opinion.

Links to Related Wikis
Same Author

1984 The Red Badge of Courage

Same Book

Aaron-O-WHS- Fahrenheit 451

Dystopian Fiction

1984 AS 1984 BZ 1984 George Orwell 1984 JX 1984 MMK 1984 PK 1984, SRG A.O's 1984

Links to related novels
Same Author

[|The Martian Chronicles]

Dystopian Fiction

[|Animal Farm- Sparknotes] [|1984- Sparknotes] [|The Giver Sparknotes]