Fahrenheit 451 Quotes And Analysis

Bradbury the Prophet Written in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was way ahead of its time in predicting the mass spread of technology and our potential to over-indulge and become addicted to electronic media in our desire for information and entertainment. Books and written words are no longer important, the only thing that interests people are news headlines and random blurbs without context. In this novel, Bradbury creates a parallel world to critique our own and to express how our society could become that of a dismal fiction book. A huge point that is presented by him is that if technology continues advancing as it is, it could easily take our interactions from one another away, make us more ignorant of the world around us than we already are, and has the potential to take matters into its own hands if we give it to much reign.
The

Bradbury shows this ignorance through Clarisse’s conversation with Montag when she makes an interesting comment, "I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly."(Bradbury 6). She blatantly points out that the drivers in this parallel see only the blur of nature and are ignorant of what the scenery really looks like. Cars are not the only thing that will rob the awareness from people. Take Mildred for example, she is one of the many who is becoming more and more detached from reality, and all it takes is a little help from her ear buds described here: “And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty.”(Bradbury 10) There is a bit of irony in the way she chooses to block out reality. The characters call ear buds “seashells”, but their primary function of keeping her ignorant of her surroundings is anything but