Fahrenheit 451

This article is about the novel. For other uses, see Fahrenheit 451 (disambiguation).

Fahrenheit 451

First edition cover
Author	Ray Bradbury
Illustrator	Joe Pernaciaro and Joseph Mugnaini
Language	English
Genre	Dystopian novel
Publisher	Ballantine Books
Publication date	1953
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	179 pp
ISBN	ISBN 978-0-7432-4722-1 (current cover edition)
OCLC	53101079
Dewey Decimal	813.54 22
LC Class	PS3503.R167 F3 2003

Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any house that contains them.

This novel has been the subject of various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury stated that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about censorship and the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he stated his motivation for writing the book in more general terms.

François Truffaut wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel in 1966. At least two BBC Radio 4 dramatisations have also been aired, both of which follow the book very closely.

The book's title refers to the temperature that Bradbury understood to be the autoignition point of book paper.

A prequel/companion exists titled A Pleasure To Burn, and a video game sequel exists as well, also titled Fahrenheit 451.

Plot summary

The Hearth and the Salamander

On a rainy night while returning from his job, Guy Montag meets his new neighbor: a 16-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan, whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit force him to question his life, his ideals, and his own perceived happiness. Montag returns home to find that his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills, and calls for medical attention. Because drug overdoses have become commonplace, apathetic technicians come over to pump Mildred's stomach. Mildred survives her overdose, but has no memory of what happened -- even after Guy tells her what she did. Over the next few days, Montag bonds with Clarisse, who tells him that her interest in intellectual activities has made her an outcast in a society dominated by shallow entertainment, until Clarisse goes missing. While talking to Montag one night, Mildred mutters that Clarisse died after getting hit by a speeding car and the rest of her family moved out following her death.

In the following days, while at work with the other firemen ransacking the book-filled house of an old woman before the inevitable burning, Montag accidentally reads a line in one of her books and hides it away before any of his coworkers can see. The woman refuses to leave her house and her books, choosing instead to light a match and burn herself alive. Jarred by the woman's suicide, Montag becomes physically ill and calls for sick leave.

Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, personally visits him and tells him the story of how books lost their value and where the firemen fit in: Over the course of several decades, people embraced new media, sports, and a quickening pace of life. Books were ruthlessly abridged or degraded to accommodate a short attention span. The government did not start the censorship; it merely exploited the situation due to minority groups protesting over the controversial, outdated content found in books. The firemen were soon hired to burn books in the name of public happiness.

Beatty adds casually that all firemen eventually steal a book out of curiosity, but if the book is burned within 24 hours, the fireman and his family won't get in trouble. After Beatty has left, Montag shows Mildred the books he has hidden in the ventilator of their home. Mildred tries to incinerate the books, but Montag subdues her and tells her that the two of them are going to read the books to see if they have value. If they do not, he promises the books will be burned and all will return to normal.

The Sieve and the Sand

While going over the stolen books, Mildred argues with Montag that books have no meaning and questions why Montag dragged her into this. Montag snaps back by mentioning Mildred's suicide attempt, Clarisse's death, the woman who burned herself, and how society is falling apart due to apathy and a pending war, then states that maybe the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction. Before Montag can finish, Mildred gets a call from her friends about coming over to watch the parlor walls (the very large televisions lining her living room walls).

Montag laments that Mildred is a lost cause (and he will be too if he can't force himself to absorb the information in the books). Montag then remembers a man he once met in the park a year ago: Faber, a former English professor. Montag seeks Faber's help, though Faber refuses at first due to his cowardice. After Montag starts to rip a few pages from the beginning of a rare copy of The New Testament (one of the few left that actually says God's word, instead of advertising products), Faber relents and teaches Montag about the importance of literature in its attempt to explain human existence. He gives Montag an ear-piece communicator he made himself so that Faber can offer guidance throughout his daily activities. At Montag's house, Mildred has friends over to watch the parlor walls. Montag unplugs the walls and tries to engage the women into meaningful conversation, only to find them concerned only with pleasure in the present moment and indifferent to the upcoming war, death, their families, and politics. Montag then brings out a book of poetry and reads the poem Dover Beach, which ends up making one of Mildred's friends cry, while the rest of them leave in disgust over how "filthy" the poem is. Montag burns the book while Mildred locks herself in the bathroom and takes her sleeping pills.

Montag returns to the firehouse the next day with only one of the books, which Beatty tosses into the trash. Beatty tells Montag that he had a dream in which they fought endlessly by quoting books to each other. In describing the dream Beatty shows that, despite his disillusionment, he was once an enthusiastic reader. A fire alarm goes off and Beatty picks up the address from the dispatcher system. He reminds Montag of his duty, theatrically leads the crew to the fire engine, and drives it to Montag's house.

Burning Bright

Beatty orders Montag to destroy his own house, telling him that his wife and neighbors were the ones who reported him. Montag tries to talk to Mildred as she quickly leaves the house, but Mildred ignores him, gets inside a waiting taxi, and vanishes down the street. Montag obeys the chief, destroying the home piece by piece with a flamethrower. As soon as he has incinerated the house, Beatty discovers Montag's earpiece (the green bullet) and plans to hunt down Faber. Montag threatens Beatty with the flamethrower and (after Beatty taunts him) burns his boss alive, and knocks his coworkers unconscious. As Montag escapes the scene, the firehouse's mechanical hound attacks him, managing to inject his leg with a tranquilizer. He destroys it with the flamethrower and limps away.

Montag runs through the city streets, to Faber's house. Faber urges him to make his way to the countryside and contact the exiled book-lovers who live there. On Faber's television, they watch news reports of another mechanical hound being released, with news helicopters following it to create a public spectacle. Montag leaves Faber's house and escapes the manhunt by jumping into a river and floating downstream into the countryside. There he meets the exiles, who have memorized various books for an upcoming time when society is ready to rediscover them. The war begins, and then, just as suddenly, ends. Montag watches helplessly as jet bombers fly overhead and attack the city with nuclear weapons, completely annihilating it. Faber escaped the city earlier on a bus, but Mildred was certainly killed.

During breakfast at dawn, Granger (leader of the group of wandering intellectuals) discusses the legendary phoenix and its endless cycle of long life, death in flames, and rebirth, adding that the phoenix must have some relation to mankind, which constantly repeats its mistakes, but that man has something the phoenix does not; man can remember the mistakes it made from before it destroyed itself, and try to not make them again. Granger then muses that a large factory of mirrors should be built, so that mankind can take a long look at itself. When the meal is over, the band goes back toward the city, to help rebuild society.

Characters

• Guy Montag is the protagonist and fireman who presents the dystopia through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, a man in conflict about it, and one resolved to be free of it. Through most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes what he hears. Bradbury notes in his afterword that he noticed, after the book was published, that Montag is the name of a paper company.
• Clarisse McClellan walks with Montag on his trips home and is one month short of being a 17-year-old girl. She is an unusual sort of person in the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. A few days after their first meeting, she disappears without any explanation, although Mildred tells Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and that her family left following her death. In the afterword of a later edition, Bradbury notes that the film adaptation changed the ending so that Clarisse (who, in the film, is now a 20-year-old school teacher who was fired for being unorthodox) was living with the exiles. Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was so happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
• Mildred Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted to sleeping pills, absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor walls" (flat-panel televisions), and indifferent to the oppressive society around her. Despite Guy Montag's attempts to break her from the spell society has on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and indifferent. After Montag scares her friends away by reading Dover Beach and unable to live with someone who has been hoarding books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and abandoning him. She is described as being very sickly and pale, thanks to dieting, her pill addiction, and the stomach pumping operation she underwent earlier in the story.
• Captain Beatty is Montag's boss. Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books due to their unpleasant content and contradicting facts and opinions. In a scene written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
• Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years regretting that he did not defend books when he saw the moves to ban them. Montag turns to him for guidance, remembering him from a chance meeting in a park some time earlier. Faber at first refuses to help Montag, but later realizes that he is only trying to learn about books, not destroy them. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell.
• Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps are Mildred's friends, and, like Stoneman and Black, below, are representative of the anti-intellectual, hedonistic society presented in the novel. During a social visit to Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives and have a cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands, their children, and politics. Mrs. Phelps has a husband named Pete who was called in to fight in the upcoming war (and believes that he'll be back in a week because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children serves no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a single mother who was married three times—her first husband divorced her, her second one died in a jet accident, and her third one committed suicide by shooting himself in the head—and has two children who don't like or even respect her (which stems from her permissive, often negligent and abusive parenting—Mrs. Bowles brags that her kids beat her up and she's glad that she can hit back). When Montag reads Dover Beach to them, Mrs. Phelps starts crying over how hollow her life is while Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading a "filthy" poem.
• Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents.
• Stoneman and Black are other firemen that are mentioned in the novel, but do not have a large impact on the story. Their main purpose in the novel is to show the reader the contrast between the firemen who do as they're told without question and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in his job, but now realizes how damaging it is to society.

Themes

There are two major themes of this novel: resistance to conformity and control of individuals via technology and mass media. Bradbury explores how the government is able to use mass media to influence society and suppress individualism through book burning. In addition, the characters Beatty and Faber point out the American population is also to blame. Due to their constant desire for a simplistic, positive image, books must be suppressed. Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light. Faber, went further to state that the American population simply stopped reading on their own. He notes that the book burnings themselves became a form of entertainment to the general public.

Predictions for the future

Sam Weller notes that Bradbury "predicted everything from flat-panel televisions to iPod earbuds and twenty-four-hour banking machines."

More notably, the novel is frequently interpreted as being critical of state-sponsored censorship. Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel, during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States. In a radio interview broadcast on December 4, 1956, Bradbury said:

I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows, there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.

In the paperback edition released in 1979, Bradbury wrote a new coda for the book containing multiple comments on censorship and its relation to the novel. The coda is also present in the 1987 mass market paperback, which is still in print.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women's Lib / Republican / Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

In the late 1950s, Bradbury observed that the novel touches on the alienation of people by media:

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

In a 2007 interview, Bradbury stated that the book explored the effects of television and mass media on the reading of literature. Bradbury went even further to elaborate his meaning, saying specifically that the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state—it is the people.

During an interview in 1975, Bradbury describes himself as "a preventor of futures, not a predictor of them." He did not believe that book burning was an inevitable part of our future, however, he wanted to warn against its development. In a later interview, when asked if he believes that teaching Fahrenheit 451 in schools will prevent his totalitarian vision of the future, Bradbury replied in the negative. Rather, he states that education must be at the kindergarten and first-grade level. If students are unable to read then, they will be unable to read Fahrenheit 451.

Writing and publication

In 1947, Bradbury wrote a short story titled "Bright Phoenix" (later revised for publication in a 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction). Bradbury expanded the basic premise of "Bright Phoenix" into "The Fireman", a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. First published in 1953 by Ballantine Books, Fahrenheit 451 is twice as long as "The Fireman". A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Playboy

Bradbury wrote the entire novel in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a pay typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half an hour. The first draft, which would become The Fireman, was 25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.

Publication history

The first U.S. printing was in October 1953 by The Ballantine Publishing Group. This first edition was printed with asbestos binding. The second U.S. Printing was in April 1991. In January 1967, the Revised Bal-Hi Edition was printed and in March 1967, the Special Book Club Edition was printed. The first Canadian printing was in October 1953 and the seventh printing was in October 1972.

The book has also been adapted into a 4.5-hour-long audiobook.

The novel was released as an e-book in December 2011.

Reception

When the book was first published in 1953, Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel "among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more." The Chicago Sunday Tribune's August Derileth described the book as a "a savage and shockingly savage prophetic view of one possible future way of life," calling it "compelling" and praising Bradbury for his "brillant imagination." Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote, "upon its publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary." Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still viewed as an important cautionary tale against conformity and book burning.

However, when the book was first published there were those who did not find merit in the tale. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being "simply padded, occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, . . . often with coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance [but] too often merely with words." Reviewing the book for Astounding Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller characterized the title piece as "one of Bradbury's bitter, almost hysterical diatribes," although he praised its "emotional drive and compelling, nagging detail." Similarly, The New York Times was unimpressed with the novel and further accused Bradbury of developing a "virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture, namely, such monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and professional sports, automobiles, and other similar aberrations which he feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man's existence."

Banning

Fahrenheit 451 was subject to censorship by its publisher, Ballantine Books, beginning in 1967. Among the changes made by the publisher were the expurgation of the words "hell," "damn," and "abortion"; the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two episodes: "In one episode, a drunken man is changed to a sick man. In another, cleaning fluff out of a human navel becomes, in the expurgated version, cleaning ears." The publishing of the censored version continued until 1979, initially along with an uncensored version of the work. From 1969 onwards, Ballentine published only the censored version. According to Greene:

In 1979, one of Bradbury's friends showed him an expurgated copy. Bradbury demanded that Ballantine Books withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the original version once again became available. In this reinstated work, in the Author's Afterword, Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author's work, but he asserts that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript "mutilation".

In 2006, parents of a tenth grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list. Their daughter was assigned the book during National Banned Book Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, her parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.

Adaptations

Playhouse 90 broadcast "A Sound of Different Drummers" on CBS in 1957. The script, which was written by Robert Alan Aurthur, combined plot ideas from Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four; Bradbury sued and eventually won on appeal.

A film adaptation written and directed by François Truffaut, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie was released in 1966.'

BBC Radio produced a one-off dramatisation of the novel in 1982 starring Michael Pennington. It was broadcast again on February 12, 2012 and April 6, 2013 on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

In 1986, the novel was adapted into a computer text adventure game of the same name.

In 2006, the Drama Desk Award winning Godlight Theatre Company produced and performed the New York City premiere of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 at 59E59 Theaters. After the completion of the New York run, the production then transferred to the Edinburgh Festival where it was a 2006 Edinburgh Festival Pick of the Fringe.

The Off-Broadway theatre The American Place Theatre presented a one man show adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 as a part of their 2008–2009 Literature to Life season.

In June 2009, a graphic novel edition of the book was published. Entitled Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation, the paperback graphic adaptation was illustrated by Tim Hamilton. The introduction in the novel is written by Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451 inspired the Birmingham Repertory Theatre production "Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine", which was performed at the Birmingham Central Library in April 2012.

The film Equilibrium was heavily influenced by Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Further reading

• Tuck, D. H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. p. 62. ISBN 0-911682-20-1.
• McGiveron, R. O. (1996). "What 'Carried the Trick'? Mass Exploitation and the Decline of Thought in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451". Extrapolation. 37 (3): 245–256.
• McGiveron, R. O. (1996). "Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451". Explicator. 54 (3): 177. ISSN 0014-4940.
• Smolla, R. A. (2009). "The Life of the Mind and a Life of Meaning: Reflections on Fahrenheit 451" (PDF). Michigan Law Review. 107 (6): 895–912.

External links

• Fahrenheit 451 title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database