The premise of Ray Bradbury’s classic homage to books is simple: in the future, it is illegal to own books. To own them risks seeing your home burned and potentially seeing yourself and/or your loved ones killed. Knowledge is the enemy—the status quo reins and is pumped into people’s brains through their TV sets. The novel is contemporary for many obvious reasons, but it’s timeless, too, as it explores how an individual can survive in society and what role education is meant to play. In an interview for the 50th anniversary edition, Bradbury is clear that the aim of his anger was not politics, but education and entertainment. In that light, he succeeds in skewering the social maladies reduced, and still reduce, knowledge to pop culture tabloid news.
The novel follows Guy Montag’s journey from fireman to outlaw, from insider to underground. He burns people’s books until his crew one day happens upon an old lady who refuses to leave her books but instead starts the flame herself. Her devotion rattles Montag. He later finds a book, reads some, shares about it, and finds himself quickly on the run from his own fire crew. On the lam he encounters a terrific entourage of old scholars devoted to keeping knowledge alive. “I am Plato’s Republic,” one tells him, as each has committed books or portions of books to memory.
They have existential purpose, as the lady did, something that Montag is searching for. After seeing the lady burned, Montag laments to his wife, Millie, “We really need to be bothered once in a while. How long has it been since you were really bothered? About something important,about something real?” Faber, the prophet of the book, tells Montag, “I don’t talk things, sir…I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”
Faber puts forth the key idea that books are simply a means to an end, not the end themselves. This is echoed by the final image of the ragtag group of men at the end who don’t need the actual books to keep what’s important alive and real. “We’re remembering,” one says.
Beatty plays to the foil to these men. He is a fire captain wrapped up in the legalism of his duty—to eradicate books. A former reader, he now believes that fire is the solution to “messy” problems created by books or the ideas found in them. Rather than confront unpleasant truths, it’s easier to simply destroy them.
Among the novel’s rich ironies is the ending. As the state is hunting for Montag, who has successfully eluded them, they must create their own fiction of his capture to save face. In the end, they become story-tellers to keep and maintain their strangle-hold on power.
In historical context, Fahrenheit 451 tackles some of the same fears of conformity that The Crucible and The Catcher in the Rye did. It is appropriate that one is sci-fi, one is drama, and one is hipster in style as each seeks out its own voice during a time when thought was closely policed. A more contemporary connection can be found in People of the Book by Pulitzer-winner Geraldine Brooks. Her novel focuses on one book and how it is kept alive over time and place, in ways that transcend east and west, Christian, Jew, and Muslim. She pulls together some of Bradbury’s ideas in one of my favorite anti-censorship passages when a rabbi pleads with a priest to not burn their holy books:
“So, my good father, you go and write the order to burn that book, as your church requires of you. And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressive, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you” (156).
Brooks’ fear is that when an environment of self-censorship exists it’s even worse than censorship coming from the outside. That’s one reason Bradbury is so hard on the education system in his interview. He feels there is a lack of courage to teach reading and writing. His books still stands as a warning about the consequences.
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