The Role Of Overdose In Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451

Losing a battle to illness is devastating and utterly heartbreaking. With addiction, it is quite often that people fail and fall into their old habits. Others simply don’t want to be sober. In How to Help Someone with an Opioid Addiction, published by the Chicago Sun Times, the author lists ways for friends and family members to assist in the process of sobriety. But, what if it doesn’t work? This question is addressed in the third section of the article. For that reason, the author writes with a rhetoric of pathos to encourage the reader to persevere and also purchase Naloxone, a drug which can alter the effects of opioids in case of emergency.

The notoriety of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has made the narrative about the duality of man humanity known even to those who have never open the book nor seen the famous film adaptation. However, though it may not be immediately apparent, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is, at its core, a story of addiction. Britain’s Pharmacy Act of 1868 had sought to identify and eliminate the use of narcotics, and though the effects were largely beneficial at first, by the 1880’s, when Stevenson’s novella was first published, deaths related to opium were on the rise. It is no coincidence that the title character is a chemist, like those affected by the Pharmacy Act, nor is it a coincidence that he is the victim of an addiction. Stevenson employs the narrative to explore the physical, psychological, and social effects of addiction, as well as the social response. The story, then, serves as an attempt to humanize and understand addiction.

Ray Bradbury’s depiction of a dystopia is interpreted through Guy Montag and his escape from society as well as Captain Beatty and his desire to get rid of books when they explore the technology and its advances in his novel, Fahrenheit 451. Born in a time of despair from the ongoing World War II, Bradbury fell in love with books as well as horror from a young age, and he enjoyed the sense of adventure it created (“Ray”). Bradbury uses “Fahrenheit 451 [as a reflection of his] lifelong love of books and his defense of the imagination against the menace of technology and government manipulation” (“Ray”), and bases his plots, characters, and themes on his past experiences and memories. World War II is a time period when literature was suddenly disappearing and technology became greatly significant. Realizing the troubles technology will create, Bradbury wrote stories based on dystopian affairs, including his most powerful novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451, presents a society in which humans suffer from depression, fear, and loss of empathy which are the result of censorship of free thought and knowledge.Humans suffer from loss of empathy due to their lack of human interaction. People live in fear of the government as the dystopian society deprives the people of knowledge. Depression is evidenced by suicidal tendencies caused by hollow lives.

Society becomes more advanced everyday, but no one knows what an advanced society is like. Fahrenheit 451 is a book taking place in 2026. Books are banned at this time and a fireman 's job is to destroy them. Guy Montag, a fireman, burns books every day for the government . One day, Montag meets Clarisse, who is a wise girl who loves books. After they meet Montag starts to think about his society and questions job. Fahrenheit 451 is a warning to society nowadays shown through technology, violence, and distractions.

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 society is corrupt. People only know what the government wants them to know and the government is controlling this by making everyone believe communication is bad. Also the people have little knowledge because books have been outlawed and destroyed. By not having knowledge the people believe anything the government tells them but what they don’t know is that there are major wars going on that are getting covered up. There is still hope though because there are people like Clarisse, Montag, and faber that are trying to relight the fire that encouraged book reading. Ray Bradbury describes a society that reflects trends of modern world and what he fears is the direction it is taking, and he wants the reader to compare the book to society today so that the reader can see the things that relate to each other and see the things that are different.

While death is permanent, life continues to change. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag demonstrates this idea as each time the motif of death appears, Montag’s perception of the world is distorted. The deaths of three very influential figures in Montag’s life allow Bradbury to push Montag to his limits. On each occasion where death is present, a change occurs in the way Montag processes the intricate workings of society’s influences on his life; and he begins to become more rebellious and self-aware.

Some have named Ray Bradbury “the uncrowned king of the science-fiction writers” because of his imagination and beautiful way of making Fahrenheit 451 come to life. The book Fahrenheit 451 is one of the first books to deal with a future society filled with people who have lost their thirst for knowledge and for whom literature is a thing of the past. The author mainly portrays this world from the point of view of Montag, a man who has discovered the power that knowledge contains and is coming to grips with the fact that it is outlawed. However, the reader also gets to see what life is like for one of the people content in living a life lacking in independent thought and imagination through his wife, Millie. Through the characterization of Mildred, and his use of figurative language in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury warns that technology has the ability to hinder independent thoughts and ideas.

Contemporary society is a variety of all things good and bad that one might misinterpret as perfect

(AGG) Think, take a good look around at your society, if you don't you might seriously regret it. (BS-1) Technology is a huge distractions and a big problem in both societies and with new advances coming out every minute, there is no stopping the distractions from taking over society. (BS-2) Fahrenheit 451 and our society are depressed and unhappy because of these distractions, so they take their lives. (BS-3) Surrounding yourself with nature gives you time to think and act off of how you think, both societies lack this. (TS) In the book Fahrenheit 451, the author conveys the message that distractions are what kill a society, that with distractions we are not able to find ourselves, and therefore there are fatal consequences, and our society

When Montag starts to question his society, he begins to take action in order to change the continuous cycle of destruction this dystopian society faces. Montag’s wife, Mildred has been sucked into the addiction of technology along with the rest of this society. Due to over-stimulation from the wall TV’s and other technology surrounding them, they are not able to sleep. To sleep, they continually use and abuse pills, because they are so distracted by the technology around them, they forget how many they take and do not stop until they overdose. As well as over-stimulation, the people in this society also use prescription pills as an escape mechanism from the bleak and fast paced society in which they live. Mildred becomes so distracted with her TV family that she forgets that she takes the pills until the whole bottle becomes empty. “Her face was like a snow-covered island…her eyes all glass, and breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, came or went” (11). Bradbury uses Mildred to portray the unfavorable effects drug abuse has on memory and moods. When Montag comes home to his wife it is clear that she has overdosed and it appears to be looked at as normal due to its constant recurrence with Mildred and others. The men who come to bring the people in Fahrenheit 451 back to life

“Gray animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray colorless eyes, gray tongues and gray thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face” (Bradbury 132). The people in Fahrenheit 451 are exactly as the protagonist, Montag, describes them: gray, animal, dehumanized and lifeless. Ray Bradbury has built a society in which people spend their days mindlessly watching television. Violence, bullying and murder are common, especially coming from school children, who spend their school days watching even more television. Montag is a fireman who burns books and slowly comes to understand the dehumanized and meaningless state that his society is in. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates how dehumanization can lead to a meaningless

People can rely on literacy and social awareness to help them be better aware and more thoughtful. But when people have neither of these skills it can harm the view they have on their surroundings. Fahrenheit 451 is an example of what would happen if social awareness and literacy were looked down on. In the society where the story takes place in not many are socially aware or can read. This lack of awareness and literacy drives people to take great lengths for their beliefs and wants, this is a problem because they don't think about the consequences their actions will have. In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury shows that literacy and social awareness are important for society through the use of characterization

Imagine a world where firemen start fires instead of putting them out. Fahrenheit 451 is set in a utopian, or dystopian to us, society, where books are burned and people rarely have real social interaction. Although Fahrenheit 451 seems nowhere close to our society, we are both alike and different to their world.

What would life be like if there were no reason or purpose to things? How would people respond to fake emotion, or react to artificial interaction? Would anyone be willing to do anything about it? Does this society sound like an exemplary utopia or a detrimental dystopia? Or do all of these factors seem to relate to life today? In the novel written by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, the society described was meant to be a utopia, where all was believed to be right, yet the society literally obliterated into a dystopia. Even though the civilization depicted in Fahrenheit 451 was a fictional dystopia, the ideals and way of life of that society can be connected to both the mental and physical actions of our current community.