Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I have been wanting to read this book for ages and now I finally had the chance. When I heard about this I thought, “What kind of sick and twisted society would burn books???.... I need to read it!” And so I did and now here’s my review.
Synopsis: Guy Montag is a fireman but not your typical one. Instead of putting our fires, he creates them. See, books are now illegal and must be burned. When the alarm goes off at the fire station it’s off to work to burn those books. Montag seems to enjoy his job until he meets Clarisse, a neighbor who just moved in next door to him. As soon as she appeared, she disappeared without a trace or warning. Then Montag finds his wife not moving and en empty pill bottle next to her. Suddenly, Montag’s life doesn’t make sense anymore and the only way he can find the answers he’s looking for is in books.
*SPOILER ALERT*
There is a lot to unpack here. First and foremost, what the fuck?? The thought of just burning books is hell to me! Who thought that was a good idea??? Bradbury, you have some serious issues. Sorry, I digress. Bradbury shows how important books are for humanity. We become lost without them. Reader or not, books have impacted our lives. It taught us how to read, write, and most importantly learn. Bradbury is also showing us the effects of tv and technology. Now, I love technology as much as the next person (hell, I’m typing this on a computer as we speak) but technology is not all there is. We need to have a sense of culture, of wonder, in our lives and we aren’t going to get that from sitting behind a computer all day (as much as I want to). Unless you read on your computer, then that’s different. Anyway, books are here for a reason and I really believe we take them for granted. I think Bradbury believes this as well. The entire book we witness Montag’s wife, Mildred, sucked into the void of television. All she wants are three walls of screens to project her favorite shows and has not a care in the world for anything else. It really shows how mindless television made her. Without books, we become of something different.
I want to take a deeper look into Mildred. At the beginning of the book, Montag walks in on her overdosed on sleeping pills. Why? We never find out. As soon as she is helped and back to full health, she doesn’t remember a thing. This says something huge. I am going to contradict myself a bit from the previous paragraph. I said before Mildred was mindless, not caring about anything but her tv shows. But then why did she try and commit suicide? Obviously, she is not as mindless as she seems and something is causing her pain. She is not as happy as she makes herself out to be. Is tv not giving her the joy she needs? But isn’t that why books were banned and tv was in? Because books were pointless and tv gave us the joy books didn't? There are a lot of questions but the one answer that I know for sure is, people are not any better off then they were before books were banned. When Montag called the police after finding his wife, guess who they sent over. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not medics! They send over plumbers. Medics are too busy doing something more important or something. The plumbers tell Montag that “this happens all the time”, and like pumping out a clogged toilet, they pumped Mildred’s stomach until the drugs were out. Suicides must be very high in this universe if this “happens all the time”. That tells you again, screams it in your face really, that people aren’t as happy as they should be.
So let's pretend I’m dumb and I believe everyone is happy watching tv all day in this book. After a while, you need some new and exciting tv shows instead of watching the same thing all day (except for those binge-watchers... you know who you are). While Montag makes his daring escape after killing his Captain and evading arrest, the police and a bloodthirsty hellhound made of metal hunt him down. What’s the best thing they could do in this situation? Oh, I know! Let’s make it into a show like cops! And that’s exactly what they did. They had helicopters and on the ground, cameramen following the hellhound and tracking Montag’s every move. They even decided to make it into a game! They told everyone listening on the radio to count down with them and when they were done, they all opened their doors and looked out their houses to see if they found Montag. Fortunately, Montag was able to disappear into a river. People are fucking nuts. If I knew a murderer was running around outside my house, I deadbolt the door and block all the windows! I wasn’t about to look out the door to certain death! This ain’t no horror movie! But I guess that’s how enticing tv is in these days. Continuing on, Montag was able to cover his tracks as soon as he hit the river and flowed down with the current. The hellhound couldn’t figure out where he was but the tv show was still going! What were they to do?? They decided that this episode needed a finale, a great ending. So they faked it. They found a random guy on the street that had some kind of violation and killed him. They pretended that he was Montag all along. Poor man. You can tell they did this for two reasons. One: they needed a great ending to the episode. One that left the viewers satisfied. Two: they couldn’t show that someone got away with it. We know that there are a lot of others hiding out with books (the reason why the fire department is open in the first place) but if they found out one got away with it, there’s hope, hope that others can get away with it too. It’s pretty disturbing thinking about it. The government probably does that today, NAY! does do that. I’m almost positive about that.
When we’re not sucked into the void of television shows, we realize what is happening around us. For example, all we hear in the news these days is about school shootings. Awful, terrible news. The thing about this world, people are too busy watching their favorite shows to realize what’s really happening. A couple of times in the book, there were mentions of a war going on. There wasn’t anything specific, just that there was a war. Throughout the entire book, the main characters didn’t mention it once. It was the least important thing to them. Montag was too busy trying to understand the importance of books, Mildred was too busy watching her favorite show and Clarise, well Clarisse was missing, presumably dead. But as Montag was far away from the city, a plane flew by and dropped a huge bomb on the city, destroying everyone and everything. No one was warned and no one saw it coming. They were too busy watching their favorite shows to realize. Moral of the story, pay attention to your surroundings. You never know what’s coming.
*SPOILER ALERT ENDS*
If you love books with a lot of deeper meanings, this is the one for you. It’s a little hard to follow at first but I could just be saying that because I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books lately lol. Anyway, I really enjoyed this one and all the hidden clues you can find in the writing. You can understand, though, that the overall message is BOOKS ARE WAY TOO IMPORTANT TO BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED!!
I’m gonna say that one more time for the people in the back
BOOKS ARE WAY TOO IMPORTANT TO BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED!!!
Overall rating: 8/10