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Fahrenheit 451 (Paperback)
by Ray Bradbury
| Category:
Fiction, Sci-Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 98.00
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¥ 88.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A spooky and yet uplifting book that describes a future world dreadfully lacking emotion, human connection, and intellectual depth. |
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Author: Ray Bradbury
Publisher: Del Rey; Reissue edition
Pub. in: August, 1987
ISBN: 0345342968
Pages: 208
Measurements: 6.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00458
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- Awards & Credential -
The author is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America the National Medal of Arts in 2004. |
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- MSL Picks -
Ray Bradbury's books are insightful and thought-provoking because he writes fictional short stories and novels about the future, with a common theme on how society uses technology. In particular, Bradbury's book, Fahrenheit 451, discusses relevant concerns about applying technology to teaching. In the back of the 50th Anniversary Edition published by Del Rey Books, there is a recent interview with Bradbury where he discusses his concerns about using radio and television in the classroom as a replacement for sound traditional teaching methodologies. When Bradbury wrote the book in the 1950's, he imagines a society where reading is no longer taught. In his recent book interview, Bradbury expresses that he is still concerned about the quality of education today and believes that there is a current problem in the educational system, with less emphasis placed on quality in comparison to when he attended school back in 1926.
Many readers feel that the book is about censorship but it actually focuses more specifically upon the idea of freedom. Bradbury says in the interview that he does not regard censorship as a problem within the United States and feels that there are many diverse groups who provide voices for various interests; yet, he considers television, including local news, as a culprit towards ignorance. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury attributes intelligence to free thinking and expresses that books are merely an agent towards learning and not a magical device to create intelligence. In a subtle way, Bradbury points out that wisdom comes from trial-and-error types of experiences and intellectual growth comes from making real-life decisions, albeit not always correct choices, but nonetheless, independent thinking is an important part of the learning process. In a democratic society, both freedom and independent choices are vital for keeping its structure sound.
The story goes something like this: there exists a dysfunctional, sick society where "thinking" is no longer valued and education is censored. Through the advent of radio and television, information is absorbed but there is no longer reflection or judgment over the validity of the source. Book burning becomes fashionable because "truth" is too disturbing. Firemen are used to keep social order and to maintain majority group satisfaction. In this time frame, religion exits but only serves to function as a media tool used for commercialism. The main character, Montag, is a fireman who sets fires to the homes where books are stored illegally. Over time, Montag is plagued by many questions, such as, why people are willing to die for books and why are the qualities of independent thinking not valued in his society? At the beginning of Fahrenheit 451, he meets a teenage girl who asks him numerous questions about how the society is structured and what would happen if things were to change. He is particularly bothered with her question as to whether he is happy. This specific question brings an important issue to light; what constitutes freedom. What would happen if academic freedom became outlawed? As Montag grows sympathetic with the rebellious cause over intellectual freedom, he discovers the history behind why his culture became dysfunctional and what future scenario has to happen in order to change it. Reading is more than an action of digesting words but requires reflection and a foundation set towards higher thinking.
Overall Fahrenheit 451 provides intriguing concepts and a very interesting story line, although Bradbury finishes with a very weak ending. There is more than one way to change society, and not necessarily through the 1950's notion that an atomic bomb has to rip through social fabric in order to create new thinking. Yet perhaps, atomic war can serve as a powerful symbolic weapon to the destruction ignorance does to society and its people. His final advice to teachers is also useful: assess the quality of what is taught and encourage students to become independent thinkers.
In Bradbury's interview, he expresses that his concern with radio and television is over its application to learning. Even though he doesn't show how radio and television can be used in education or explains the definition of quality media, Bradbury does not dismiss the idea that electronic transmissions can be used effectively. In Fahrenheit 451, Montag is told directly by Professor Faber that books do not create learning but that they are merely vehicles to describe thoughts. Montag, however, is still bothered about the role of books and education because he recognizes that men spend their entire lives to record thoughts and experiences, and Montag believes that society can learn from this type of wisdom. In fact, at the moment when Montag begins to question his social structure, it leads him into independent thought and freedom. Furthermore, because Montag is able to discern between authors who contribute greatly to social thinking and writers who produce work for entertainment purposes, he is willing eventually to put his own life at risk for knowledge.
Yet, whether radio, television, or books are used for teaching, the point is clear, it is the way that they are used and the values which are placed upon the medium that makes a difference in learning. A page from a book can be just as meaningless as a television commercial that is tuned out by the listener. How teachers reach students is a very critical issue in Bradbury's Farenheit 451. Montag becomes the next teacher and leader in his dysfunctional society, and as observers, we too can learn from Montag about our future roles in determining social values. This book is small enough to read within a few evenings but has enough material to "think" about for a long time.
(From quoting Doreen Mace, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Ray Bradbury the author of more than 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America.
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From the Pubilisher:
Bradbury's novel details the eternal war between censorship and freedom of thought and continues to be relevant today more than ever. In Bradbury's future, books are illegal and happily so - citizens are too busy watching their wall-sized televisions and listening to their in-ear "seashell" radios to care about the loss of good literature. Guy Montag begins the novel as a fireman who enforces the temperature of the title - that at which books burn - but then transforms and tries to show his society the mistake of censorship.
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It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.
He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.
He hung up his black beetle-colored helmet and shined it; he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs.
He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air onto the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.
Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had called his name.
The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment prior to his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person’s standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?
He turned the corner.
The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.
The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood regarding Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive that he felt he had said something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix disc on his chest, he spoke again.
“Of course,” he said, “you’re our new neighbor, aren’t you?”
“And you must be” - she raised her eyes from his professional symbols “ - the fireman.” Her voice trailed off.
“How oddly you say that.”
“I’d - I’d have known it with my eyes shut,” she said, slowly.
“What - the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains,” he laughed. “You never wash it off completely.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, in awe.
He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.
“Kerosene,” he said, because the silence had lengthened, “is nothing but perfume to me.”
“Does it seem like that, really?”
“Of course. Why not?”
She gave herself time to think of it. “I don’t know.” She turned to face the sidewalk going toward their homes. “Do you mind if I walk back with you? I’m Clarisse McClellan.”
“Clarisse. Guy Montag. Come along. What are you doing out so late wandering around? How old are you?”
They walked in the warm-cool blowing night on the silvered pavement and there was the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air, and he looked around and realized this was quite impossible, so late in the year.
There was only the girl walking with him now, her face bright as snow in the moonlight, and he knew she was working his questions around, seeking the best answers she could possibly give.
“Well,” she said, “I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane. Isn’t this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.”
They walked on again in silence and finally she said, thoughtfully, “You know, I’m not afraid of you at all.”
He was surprised. “Why should you be?”
“So many people are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you’re just a man, after all…”
He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but - what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and grew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon…
And then Clarisse McClellan said:
“Do you mind if I ask? How long’ve you worked at being a fireman?”
“Since I was twenty, ten years ago.”
“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?”
He laughed. “That’s against the law!”
“Oh. Of course.”
“It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
They walked still farther and the girl said, “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?”
“No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.”
“Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.”
He laughed.
She glanced quickly over. “Why are you laughing?”
“I don’t know.” He started to laugh again and stopped. “Why?”
“You laugh when I haven’t been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.”
He stopped walking. “You are an odd one,” he said, looking at her. “Haven’t you any respect?”
“I don’t mean to be insulting. It’s just I love to watch people too much, I guess.”
“Well, doesn’t this mean anything to you?” He tapped the numerals 451 stitched on his char-colored sleeve.
“Yes,” she whispered. She increased her pace. “Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?”
“You’re changing the subject!”
“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” she said. “If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad, too?”
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The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Frightening in its implications... Mr. Bradbury's account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating. |
Amy (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
There are some books that no matter how long ago you've read them, details from the story stick in your mind. Farenheit 451 was like that for me. I was 15 when I first checked it out from the high school library. I hadn't really gotten very far into the book when a cute guy noticed I was carrying it around school. "Good book," he commented. "Yeah, I'm still reading it," I answered. Wow, I thought, approval from an older guy. That gave me the incentive to finish what turned out to be one of the most important sf novels ever written.
It's been more than 20 years since I've spoken to but I'll always feel
grateful to him whenever I hear about bookburnings. His tiny bit of
encouragement introduced me to one of the genre's finest writers. |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
The reason that Fahrenheit 451 is such a great book can be a hard one to pin down, though the fact that it is goes without question.
It is the story of a fireman, Guy Montag, who faces a crisis when he begins to question his whole way of life after a chance encounter with a young woman on his street. After this first, casual meeting, he begins to re-examine his relationship with his wife in contrast to the familiar, warm relationship that the girl has with her family- instead of this loving type of exchange, Guy finds that his closest relation, his wife, spends all day with the three-walled 'family' that barks constantly at her from a script, but that never bothers to actually say anything. From these estranged roots, Guy turns to look at the thing that he is destroying and that he has been taught to hate- books. This curiosity gets him into trouble quickly, forcing him out of the life that he knows and into one of panic, flight, and eventual banishment... though even this is a blessing in disguise.
The novel works from the basis of a phenomenon that has occurred in literature in recent years - that of the utopia gone bad, something that Thomas Moore never could have imagined. In this growing canon of literature you will find such venerable titles as 1984, We, Anthem, and Brave New World... what separates 451 from these is its focus on the specific problem of entertainment as a venue to the masses. What happens when the government controls our books, our television, our inputs? What happens when we close our minds off to literature because it is going to offend someone, somewhere? What happens when we become so PC that we burn The Merchant of Venice because it might offend Jews, Roots because it might make whites look bad, and Huckleberry Finn because it might make blacks uncomfortable?
Bradbury attempts to answer this question, albeit indirectly- true, no one can be offended if these things are removed, but neither can anyone learn and grow. Life, civilization, everything- it all becomes stagnant, sliding slowly away to meaningless interactions that amount to nothing. Bradbury does not tell us that our point is to go around offending but rather that in order to function, we must push one another. Life, love, happiness... none of these happen without passion, fire, intensity... all of those emotions which flow might step on someone's toes, true, but they are necessary to be human.
The novel tackles this with an unforgiving brutal bent to those who would censor and suppress anything that might make a person think. Captain Beatty is the epitome of the problem, though even in his final thoughts he seems to be full of a sort of self-loathing. This character, along with several others, leads the reader to examine the different sides of the issue at hand, trying to discern which approach is most appropriate.
In doing this Bradbury achieves what the intent of the novel is- to make us think about and examine our own views on what art (specifically literature, but it can be generalized) is and what place it has in society. Should it be censored? Should it be controlled (as in Plato's Republic)?
The fact that the novel encourages these questions in such a short span (a little over 100 pages) is a testament to Ray Bradbury's brilliance as a novelist... it is also the reason that you, the potential reader, should make sure to pick up a copy and tear through it (it can be finished in a single day, easily). By doing so, you will be facing what are still very relevant problems in our modern day and time.
Bottom line: this book is considered a modern classic for good reason. It has all the elements - ideas, execution, style, substance - and should not be missed.
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James (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Ray Bradbury's 1953 phantasmagoric blockbuster Fahrenheit 451, written at the height of the fabulist's authorial powers, is a tale of a world gone mad, a topsy-turvy America in which black leather-clad firemen race laughing on their steely Salamanders on midnight alarms, not to quench fires but to start them.
The firemen of the nightmare world of Fahrenheit 451, of which the novel's hero Guy Montag is a dedicated one, comprise an army turned against an enemy far more insidious than Flame: they mobilize against ideas, and turn their napalm hoses on the feeble paper on which those subversive ideas are printed, and on the vulnerable binding in which the paper is housed.
When I first read Fahrenheit 451 nearly two decades ago, I felt beaten down, nauseated and fatigued. I believed then, and believe now, that it was the most scarily bleak and mercilessly depressing book I had ever read. Even then, I felt the cushion between Bradbury's 24th century nightmare and what we call modern reality was thin and worn.
Bradbury gave us until the 24th century to submerge ourselves in the dark, sedated, media-slaked night of Fahrenheit 451. Looking around me, I have come to the conclusion that Bradbury was a pretty optimstic guy.
Like Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian vision, a glimpse into a future America that is frighteningly familiar and yet horribly wrong. It is a technologically advanced, subtle, sophisticated world, full of high-definition television screens that take up an entire wall and beam 24 hour programming to a vacant and eager television audience, 24-hour Reality programming that serves up a TV "Family" more engaging, more lifelike, more agreeable, than their own.
This is a world where bored, vacuous housewives exchange barbs on the latest presidential contenders laced with observations on which candidate is the most handsome, and which has the most noticeable (to the Television Audience, naturally) facial bunion or boil. It is a world of 'seashells', tiny earphones designed to nest in the inner ear and breathe a sussurus of music into the mind of a medicated listener.
Like his English counterparts Huxley and Orwell, Bradbury has served up a soft tyrannical state manned, not by the zealous, but by zombies. It is a world ruled by the media-addicted, the apathetic, the listless, the medicated, the overdosed, the sleeping. Books have been banned, and consigned to the Flame, not because of a despotic regime, but by the common, courteous consensus of a modern democracy desperately eager not to give offense to anyone.
Sound familiar?
Much like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 works because it drills down on an unlikely protagonist. Guy Montag, at least when we meet him, sincerely loves his job. His fellow firemen are not zealots or fascists, but simply pragmatic working men who enjoy what they do. There are unpleasant aspects to the work, naturally - among them the incineration of an old eccentric woman who prefers to die with her beloved books - but like most of Fahrenheit 451's society, Montag prefers not to think about it. Take a pill, or better still take two - and don't call me in the morning. For Montag, truly, it is a 'pleasure to burn'.
Like most revolutionaries, though, Guy Montag is simmering from within; dissatisifed with his wife, whose stomach must be pumped on the very evening he returns from the euphoria of the Burn; dissatisifed with the apathetic society in which he lives; dissatisfied with a job which fails to give expression to the rebel soul that burns within, that impels him to challenge his wife's brazen, flippant friends.
There are three catalysts that propel Montag to rebellion: the girl Clarisse, whom he befriends; the immolation of the old woman at the Fire; and his own clandestine book collection.
Fahrenheit 451 succeeds as both jeremiad and prophecy, true, but it also engages because Bradbury is a literary master: his spare, mechanical narrative of Montag's wife having her stomach pumped by two callous, dirty, jocular technicians practically breathes pure horror, and is one of the most soul-deadening passages I have ever read.
But 451 also succeeds because it is a mirror of our own increasingly apathetic, violent, media-saturated world: is it so hard to see ourselves in Montag's trackless, cookie-cutter suburban landscape where bookish teenage girls are run down beneath the wheels of speeding pranksters, themselves bored and looking for the cheap thrill of ultra-violence? Is it so hard to see ourselves in the avidity of the Television Audience, watching the panicked, doomed, frantic rictus face of the condemned man stalked by the mechanical Hound, the images of his death broadcast back by the electronic antennaes on the monster's back? Isn't that merely COPS or "Survivor" with a bite?
I've seen the Future, and it works. Because it is our world I see, our world upon us - for that reason, Fahrenheit 451 is the most terrifying book I have ever read.
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