Life Exposed In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

This is the very first sentence of Ray Bradbury’s novel, “Fahrenheit 451.” Just from reading this sentence you can probably imagine how the rest of this future-based dystopian flows on. This is a world where there are television screens as walls, high-speed cars, and everything tries to make everyone happy. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Wrong. In addition to these luxuries, there are frightening, highly-intelligent robotic dogs called Mechanical Hounds, no places or reasons to think, and burnings of books. It’s practically a futuristic version of Germany during World War II. You know what happened during World War II? People died. Lots of people died. Obviously, Ray Bradbury was clearly trying to convey a warning

In the novel, one character doesn’t want to go to school anymore and doesn’t have any friends because they scare her. Page 30 states, “‘I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other… Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks… My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn’t kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility…’” As you can see, this society lacks the idea of responsibility and law enforcement concerning children. The kids grow up thinking that killing others is something they can do for fun. Their parents and teachers don’t enforce the belief we have today that kids and guns should not go together. “Fahrenheit 451” is trying to warn us that allowing children to have free range of guns and violence leads to many deaths which leads to a lot of depression and grief in people that are sometimes under the age of ten. One other example of how kids and teens act in “Fahrenheit 451” can be found on page 128 which says, “A carful of children, all ages… simply said, ‘Let’s get him…’ simply a number of children out for a long night of roaring five or six hundred miles in a few moonlit hours… They would have killed me, thought Montag… For no reason at all in the world they would have killed me.” This shows that parents are not responsible enough to know what their children are doing. Also, it implies the fact that children have no respect for anyone which is a lesson that Bradbury is indirectly warning us to keep teaching. For the children and teens in “Fahrenheit 451,” when it comes down to the life of a stranger or the personal fun, they pick personal fun every