Book Review: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

In 2000, poet Kai Niemien wrote: “Reading too much is not good for your eyes” because “they begin to see more clearly”. Unknowingly, Niemien put his finger on the key theme of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which tells the story of a world in which books have been outlawed, firemen set fires instead of putting them out, and most people while away their days staring at the immersive and interactive ‘parlor walls’ (think here of what we know as television, social media, and the general ubiquity of screens). The entire composition of society is based on a single slogan: “Happiness is important. Fun is everything” (Bradbury, 1953, 85). In a shadowy echo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the utopian agenda of the day is that people, above all, want to be happy.

As one character says: 

I want to be happy, people say … That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these. (Bradbury, 1953, 78)

But this utopian future of happiness and pleasure can only be realised once all the books have been removed, because books “show the pores in the face of life” (Bradbury, 1953, 108), and they can leave you “lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives” (Bradbury, 1953, 139). Essentially, books detract from happiness – they inspire thinking and reflection, and, as any philosopher would know, thinking can be a pain in the behind. The solution? Fire, because it “destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it” (Bradbury, 1953, 149-150).

On the face of it, the combined measures of removing books and encouraging an obsession with constantly chatting parlour walls is nothing but a misguided attempt to give the people what they want. However, these actions have a more sinister purpose: to create a pacified, prostrate civil society, one that, to paraphrase James C. Scott (1998), is unable – and even unwilling – to resist the pernicious seepage of authoritarian agendas into daily life. Burning books is merely the opening salvo to this agenda, because “you don’t have to burn books, do you, if the world starts to fill up with non-readers, non-learners, non-knowers[.]” (Bradbury, 1953: 225). Reading makes us aware – rather, makes us see – and “being aware of the world makes us angry, and anger is not conducive to an easily-managed society” (Bradbury, 1953, 115).

What Bradbury is essentially commenting on is the act of thinking: its dangers, its necessity, its potential for resistance to oppression, and most of all, the fact that it requires distraction-free time: “‘We’ve plenty of off-hours … But time to think?’” (Bradbury, 1953, 109). He posits this view by tracing the transformative journey of his protagonist, Guy Montag. A fireman himself, Montag begins to question the status quo when he meets a whimsical young woman named Clarisse. Along the way, he also encounters several other characters who (consciously and otherwise) guide him on his journey, including his wife Mildred, Professor Faber, and even the head of the firemen, Captain Beatty.

Montag’s journey makes him realise that, despite having “everything [they] need to be happy” (Bradbury, 1953, 107), people are stuck in glassy-eyed misery, as “[s]omething’s missing” (Bradbury, 1953, 107). Indeed, “[t]he only thing [Montag] positively knew was gone was the books [he’d] burned” (Bradbury, 1953, 107). Along the way, he discovers a universal truth (one Ernest Hemingway also famously explored in The Old Man and the Sea (1952)): that adversity, and not happiness, is what roots us:

The comfortable people only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam … Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers … without completing the cycle back to reality. (Bradbury, 1953, 108)

When Montag befriends Professor Faber, he also learns the cost of resistance. Damned if he did and damned because he didn’t, Faber is wracked with guilt; even though he saw what was happening to the world, he refrained from saying anything: 

You are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the “guilty”, but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late. (Bradbury, 1953, 106-107)

If Faber teaches us anything, it’s that being able to ‘see’ in the sense meant by Niemien is not only a blessing; it is also a curse – or, more precisely, a responsibility, a call to put one’s own needs, wants, and even safety on the line for the greater good of society. A philosopher at heart, Montag flees the city when he realises the simultaneous danger and importance of his always evolving perspectives on the status quo. When the snake finally eats his own tail and an atom bomb destroys the city, he returns to a flattened society to begin the long process of rebuilding. Accompanying him is the realisation that “even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them” (Bradbury, 1953, 209). At the same time, he finds comfort knowing that, like the mythological Phoenix, humankind will continue to rise up from the ashes, each time a better version of ourselves:

We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people who remember, every generation. (Bradbury, 1953, 209)

What Montag is referring to is the role of the philosopher: to remember, to critique, to resist – and, finally, to see.

Bradbury famously wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in the basement of a library at a rented typewriter. The novel has been criticised – and even banned – for the very thing it critiques: censorship. Some seven decades years after its publication, we are faced with a world that wants us to be distracted, unthinking, and blind to the realities of life in the 21st century. While we have not (yet) resorted to burning books, we are seeing in real time the pernicious effects of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1947) termed the ‘culture industry’. In this vein, Fahrenheit 451 is a cautionary tale about the war on thinking, and a call to “be really bothered once in a while … [a]bout something important, something real” (Bradbury, 1953, 269). Civilisations are built on the thoughts of people brave enough to reflect on difficult matters, and who risk getting upset by these reflections. Without thinking, we might be happy, but we might not have anything else. What Bradbury asks of us is to open our eyes, to see reality for what it is (and to let our eyesight be “ruined”, as Niemien says) by the wisdom contained in books. As philosophers, he tells us to keep thinking, to keep reading, to keep being uncomfortable, to avoid the pleasure of distraction, and ultimately, never to let anyone burn our books. And finally, he leaves us with the words of Juan Ramon Jimenez (Bradbury, 1953, epigraph): “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”

Works Cited:

Bradbury, R. 1953. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine Books.

Hemingway, E. 1952. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T.W. 1947. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming. Amsterdam: Querido.

Huxley, A. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.

Niemien, K. 2000. Serious Poems. Translated by A. Hollo. Minneapolis: Rain Taxi.

Orwell, G. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg.

Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.