The Controversial Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury was the author of countless stories, but perhaps his most iconic is the controversial Fahrenheit 451. This frequently banned book about the banning of books outlines a dystopian future where television and radio have replaced reading and walking and the government is most certainly not the friend of the learned. Bradbury created a world at once fantastic and believable that resonates even more in today’s age of smartphones and video streaming.
The question that comes to many readers’ minds is this: What prompted Bradbury, in the 1950s, to write a book about intrusive technology? To find the answer, it is necessary to look at both his childhood and the events surrounding the book’s publication in 1953.
Ray Bradbury was born
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The book depicts a future where reading is “bad” and no one is interested in doing it. In the real world, the number of adults who read for pleasure has been falling for a long time. According to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of reading adults fell by 7% between 1992 and 2002. As predicted by Ray Bradbury, this decline has been attributed to the rise of technology. He also succeeded in predicting such things as the rise of the flat screen television through his “parlor walls” and earbuds through his “thimble radios”. He had seen great innovation in his life. He simply changed the inventions to a logical future form. Most importantly, though, his predictions depicted a world obsessed with screens, such as the one we live in today. The roots of this addiction were already apparent to him early in the age of television. People had begun to form routines around TV programs and multitask with technology. This prompted him to write Fahrenheit 451 as a warning of what could happen if those habits continued.
Ray Bradbury put a lot of himself into his book. Every facet of the story was drawn from some change he saw occurring around him. He witnessed the dramatic shift radio and television were bringing to the lives of many people and, as a cautionary statement, he illustrated a world of extreme tech use. The only question now is this: Will we listen to his advice, or continue to abandon literature for the television, computers, and
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210 Words | 1 PagesOne thing that really bothered or annoyed me was the fact that Bradbury used “man” instead of putting “person. Like were all books written by men?Other than that, I personally think this quote is really extensive because it shows how Montag shows guilt, I like how it compares a lifetime of work for writing certain books, and takes nothing but two minutes to destroy. In this society books are portrayed as being unacceptable. This society has a odd way of viewing everything. I think that television and movies are a much simpler investment in this society, If you think about it this society is kinda similar in a way to present day society, SO many people think that books are tedious but in reality they are just too lazy to search for a book that
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