Ray Bradbury's values and attitudes are very easy to spot in one of his most famous novels, Fahrenheit 451. This story is basically a futuristic novel about how addicted people are to their televisions. People in the story have lost their own personal thoughts and no longer read books. Guy Montag, one of the main characters, has begun his quest to answer the question 'why?' It is not socially acceptable anymore to have your own thoughts and have open discussions with. Then he meets Clarrise. Her family still talks. They talk about everything you could imagine. This is super weird for the time that they are living in. Ray Bradbury is trying to show the reader that the value of thought and discussion are very important. Without your own unique beliefs everyone begins to become the same. Throughout the story firemen would start the fires instead of put out the fires as we know in real life. They would start fires on piles of books that were deemed unsuitable for humans to read. If they contained anything that had a unique opinion it would be burned. I think showing the burning of the books to the reader who is, you know, reading a book, has the purpose showing them that their own thoughts would not be valued in a society like the one in Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury also shut down the idea to many media personnel that this novel was not about a controlling government, but I think it can be looked at in both lights.
The narrator of the book is written in third person limited omniscient. This shows all of Montag's thoughts but no one else. I wish that we also would have been able to see into the minds of the characters with a non-limited third person narrator. Overall I did understand what Ray Bradbury was trying to get across to the reader.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Del Rey Books, 1991. Print.
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