How Does Carter Characterize In Fahrenheit 451

Stephen L. Carter saw a future without reading. He saw what life would be like without the complexity of novels and forward thinking. In “Reading For Pleasure Is in Painful Decline,” Carter illustrates how reading amongst people has not progressed but digressed. Simply being at a screening of “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” and seeing two girls discuss the importance of reading for pleasure, his mind was exposed to the reality of today’s world sans reading and the knowledge that is adhered with it. He justifies that by reading a fiction novel and later moving into more challenging works, people can further the boundaries of their knowledge. However, as Carter saw, most do not perceive it that way. In this prose, Stephen Carter uses rhetorical devices such as: allusion, anecdote, and humor, to delineate how the amount of reading has decreased. In this work, Stephen L. Carter alludes to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This is shown by the quote, “The more of us who reduce reading to no more than an unpleasant obligation, the faster we descend toward the world of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.” His analogy to this novel provides a clear illustration of how Carter envisions society’s future without reading. To some extent, the plot line of Fahrenheit 451 may frighten

Illustrating this, he says, “Exiting the movie theatre after a showing of ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,’ I overheard the following conversation between two teenagers…” This allows the reader to compare Carter’s experience to one of their own. They are now able to recall on a conversation similar to this and also, possibly, how the lack of reading has affected their lives. This allows them to not only make connections with the text, but also with Carter himself, and the idea of reading in their own