The Problem Of Censorship In Fahrenheit 451

Is Censorship Still a Problem? Censorship may seem to be a problem washed away with the First Amendment of the Constitution, but it is actually a rampant problem in some parts of the country, including the masked target of Vonnegut’s letter You Have Insulted Me. Censorship is actually taking hold of many schools elementary and collages alike, from liberals demanding that all “offensive” texts, flags, statues, arts, and writings be banned and kept away to parents wanting their little babies to be kept out of the way of words. The censorship at hand is much like the early stages of what Bradbury wrote about in his famous book Fahrenheit 451 in which, all books are cleansed from the earth through the quick hands of fire. The passages of Bradbury

Vonnegut is writing about his book specifically being burned by a school, and our God given rights being taken via selective availability of literature. “I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school” Vonnegut writes, and in this he demonstrates calm resolve with the pressing matter of his stories being obliterated. Bradbury’s writing, on the other hand, is about how if cultural needs demanded books are taken from society. With the books gone the end result would be widespread and in depth ignorance and carelessness of the said society, leaving it a desolate and emotionless

When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 he did not write it as a prediction as to what the future would come to with books being taken out of society, he wrote the book as a warning to what the world would become if the books were all banned and burned. In Fahrenheit 451 we see him allude to this point through his main antagonist Captain Beatty “No wonder books stopped selling…. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick thank God” (61). On the other hand, when Vonnegut wrote his letter You Have Insulted Me to an unnamed school board about the desecration of his books, he was bringing to light a horrid present where book burning and censorship via fire is already a real thing. When Vonnegut writes his letter he elaborates on the length at which they are going to cover his words testing them to burn the very letter he confronted them with “It is a strictly private letter… Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your