Fahrenheit 451 Quote Analysis

In a society where the people don’t care and talk to each other, but spend time surrounded by TVs, we can see how they get pleasure from burning books and killing each other. In Fahrenheit 451, we see the writer Ray Bradbury criticizes the ignorant and corrupted society. He criticizes the society through the lack of communication, the lack of knowledge and the violence. Firstly, we can see how the people in this corrupted society stay away from and hardly communicate with each other. For instance, we can see how Montag and Mildred are far away even when they are in the same room when the narrator describes “[Montag] lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea” (Bradbury, 39). This metaphor shows the distance between Montag and Mildred that isn’t physical but emotional,

In addition we can see how the firemen have fun and pleasure while they burn books when the narrator describes “The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry. The man danced and slipped and fell over them” (Bradbury, 35). This description shows the firemen’s lack of knowledge because by burning books they feel happy even though they don’t know what the books contain. In another instance, we can see the books are being described by the firemen captain “Beatty” as “loaded gun” when he says: “’A book is a loaded gun in the house next door’” (Bradbury, 56). The metaphor here shows how the people tend to not pursue knowledge, because the knowledge in the books are considered dangerous and the people are afraid of books because of its content that is thought to be unfortunate. These examples show us how people are afraid of reading books and tend to have fun burning them which makes the society ignorant because of lack in