Censorship Exposed In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

With brilliant ubiquity, coquelicot-hued flames emanate censorious desires as they smolder and consume all content that ostensibly bears offensive intentions. Rife with a similar spectacle, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 details a society that condemns all books to bask in a kerosene-laden inferno because they are capable of affronting certain groups. Through his nightmarish caricature of modern times, Bradbury presents a vatic representation of the absurdity and peril of social reality in which draconian censorship reigns supreme. The story serves as testament to the fact that censorship will eventually remove everything to prevent offending anyone by effacing the substance of all materials and matters and making use of triviality

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book….Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too….Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything” (Bradbury 57). Censorable material becomes hollow and vapid, unrecognizable remnants of their former selves. Wry diminutions dilute various subject matters absolutely, leaving no room for even the faintest smear of peccadillo. Withal, indulging in staggering manipulation, censorship instead swamps the masses with frivolousness until the idea of something being offensive is as invisible and lifeless as a single spector drifting through a zephyrous lull. “Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't

“We all must be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against” (Bradbury 55-56). Since each and every person is subject to solely viewing the sum of what censorship does not block off, all people consequently develop the same notions, biases, fears, and so forth, leaving little to no room for the spawn of antipathy and enmity. This system of eliminating differences dissuades anyone from remarking or contriving in an offensive manner, lest he become a hypocrite in the process. What man can renounce a quality in someone else when it is one of the very things that makes him the man that he is? It may be true that humans bear a great capacity for self awareness, embolden their individuality with an almost unconscious resoluteness. Yet still, when censorship has such a resounding involvement on the general life experiences of all and the interpretation of those experiences, along with the access to information, no one has the means or inspiration to impugn his neighbors and rebel away from society. Through this reconfiguration of the individual to disassociate him from his insolent revelations, he becomes another insignificant star twinkling with average brightness in the nighttime sky,