Fahrenheit 451 Response

Fahrenheit 451 Response Final

By Gus Miller, Class 802

In Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, a corrupt government sends firemen to incinerate any books and structures hiding them. In this future, the government utterly dominates society, feebling their minds with promises of pleasure and keeping their wits nullified with mindless TV programs and entertainment. In order to be left to its own devices, the government keeps its citizens off its back with a false sense of utopian prosperity and of effortless, instant gratitude. While much of the world is in a difficult situation, the people of this country live in blissful ignorance of the world’s state as a war approaches. Guy Montag, a fireman, starts wondering about his job and his country, which sets him on an investigation where he breaks his mind free of the cumbersome chains of society, allowing him to question the true motives and actions of the master puppeteers in power. This book speaks to me about how power and control can compel people in a position of authority to become completely corrupt, sacrificing their own people’s freedom for a throne of political might.

Books are contraband in Bradburys’ universe, and owning them will swiftly escort you to jail and your house to a smoldering pile of ashes. The books are said to be full of corrupting knowledge that will unnecessarily complicate and send into discord the lives of readers. the government has been able to convince people of this by imprisoning offenders and using particularly philosophical excerpts to convince people of their correctness. Thus, the illegality of books is portrayed as a benevolent form of protection for the people meant only in good will to protect their happiness. Fire captain Beatty says at one point to Montag, “Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.” This shows how the government is trying to avoid upsetting different groups of people by normalizing all media into placid, inoffensive pictures and cartoons, and eventually, they banned books altogether. The ideas present throughout history’s literature could pose a threat to the position the government has society pinned, and therefore the government wants to eliminate them by any means necessary.

The government seems unaffected by, and even willing to inflict, detrimental states of mind on its own citizens. They use certain techniques to help move people’s thoughts away from real issues, and the destruction of books is one of the prime ways they do this. In order to please but also silence people, media is neutralized, and offenders of the strict laws against behaviors that could threaten the government are quietly locked away. Fire stations house automatons called mechanical hounds, horrific octopedal robots that inject their victims with lethal doses of anesthetics, hunting them down with advanced tracking technology based on chemical recognition. These weapons show that the government is bent on the silent subjugation of its subjects, utilizing something that could be compared to a brutal war machine to tuck away violators of its self-protecting laws. “...The rat, cat or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped by gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine.” The fact that the government would unleash this on their own people is further made astonishing by the fact that while hunting for Montag, the government tells a Hound to pounce on and kill an innocent man taking a walk, proclaiming that they were Montag to make the people feel safe. This shows that the government is truly willing to kill and lie, programming machines of murder to control the people they are supposed to help and guide.

The government wants to be absolutely powerful, a dictatorship under the facade of a democracy. They use techniques like hoodwinking their people and hunting down threats to attain and preserve this goal, and also to hide some very dark secrets.. However, behind the benevolent guise the government hides under, the world is vastly more far gone than they want anyone to know. In fact, the country is on the brink of a nuclear war, with tensions building and bombers shrieking through the sky. However, amidst this torrent of threat to their utopian control over the country’s citizens, the government characteristically hoodwinks the people, having them believe that everything is just fine and the war is going to be won swiftly and effectively, isolating the people from the outside world and severing any connections people might feel to anyone outside of their bubble of safety and mindless satisfaction. In fact, things couldn’t be going worse. “And the war begun and ended in that instant…  The merest flourish of light and motion in the sky… As quick as the whisper of a scythe…” The city, amidst their interactive television walls and super speed cars and parlors, was bombed into oblivion, showing the complete and utter extent to which the government wants to control people: it would have people believe that everything was centered around their pleasure just as their virtual utopia was on the verge of annihilation for that much more power over their blind subjects.

In conclusion, Fahrenheit 451 is a deep and somewhat foreboding book that shows the consequences that could spring from a corrupt government and the way knowledge can affect people. Bradbury takes a strong position in censorship, and it shows how society operates and how people affect many aspects of each others’ lives. It explores the potential of power-hungry people to spell civilizations’ doom and use their people as a stairway to a throne of power. The government seems like the kind of monstrous, terrible group of people that would never take into consideration anything besides their goal. However, Bradbury shows that people like this would consider everything, and that they are simply very smart and calculating people with no sense of moral. They logically think through things and use a variety of horrible but effective methods to make themselves among the very few people in the entire country who actually knows anything besides the things imprinted into their minds by others. This book shows the potential for people to desperately seek power, stopping at nothing to gain utter control over everything.