Why Does Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 Speak to Us More Than Ever?

4.5.2024:

Jules Verne as a Father of Sci-Fi

I have loved reading books since I was a small child. I have already mentioned in my introduction that my father brought me to this obsession. He taught me to love good stories before I could even read them myself.

A very specific place in my heart has the genre of Sci-Fi or Science Fiction if you like.

You see, for many people, a Sci-Fi story is just about a group of people fighting their way to survival on a hostile strange planet full of aliens that are jumping out of the darkness on our favourite characters and step by step decimating them.

However, what I have described in the lines above is more likely Sci-Fi horror. The Sci-Fi genre itself doesn´t need to be and very often it´s not so simple.

When I was a child my favourite author of Sci-Fi stories was a French novelist Jules Verne (1828-1905). In my opinion, we can consider Jules Verne to be the father of modern Sci-Fi.

Who would not known Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island, Carpathian Castle and many, many more?

Verne´s stories contain everything that a reader of a good Sci-Fi story loves and expects. A dramatic storyline with characters that are not just black and white but on the contrary growing with the challenges that they are facing in the story, an adventure, a secret, and most importantly a scientific invention or approach that is in the centre of the story as something that either helps the characters of the story to deal with their challenges or complicates their progress etc.

Even though most of Verne´s stories were written in the 19th century you can read them even nowadays. Your mouth will drop open and you will wonder how on Earth Jules Verne could imagine many scientists’ inventions at the time when science as we know it nowadays was in its infancy.

I would say that Jules Verne brought into Sci-Fi its most important aspect. He was quite clearly an admirer of science and modern inventions. But he was also able to foresee the potential danger of their misuse by people against other people. He was able to think about how modern inventions could harm human life and society in the future.

Sci-Fi Story As a Scientific Lab

A very good Sci-Fi story is as a scientific lab where you can test your theory, and your invention before you would let it out to the real world.

For your story, you can create a world and people or creatures that are nothing like our planet Earth with their physical lows, their society, original nature and biology etc. Or you can write a Sci-Fi story that will happen on our planet soon. Your story can even take place in the past if you like and still could have features of Sci-Fi. Possibilities seem endless.

But, what is most important is the fact that your Sci-Fi story should somehow reflect our lives nowadays. It should set a mirror in front of us and make us ask ourselves questions that might be quite uncomfortable. Questions about some changes in our human society that are supposed to take place, about technological inventions that we might use etc.

Therefore, a good Sci-Fi story is a scientific lab where its author can try to implement those inventions or changes without harming anyone in reality.

The best Sci-Fi stories written can speak to us and carry a very strong message regardless of the time when they were written.

Such stories in my opinion were written by Jules Verne and many other good Sci-Fi authors, such as Ray Bradbury in his Fahrenheit 451.

I Read It Four Times In Less Than a Year

Even though I am quite a big reader, especially in matters of Sci-Fi, fantasy and similar stories, for some reason I have got to reading Fahrenheit 451 quite recently.

I was listening to the story as an audiobook while I was working on our garden. In these busy times, this is the best way for me how to read books.

A sign of a very good story for me is when I read it or listen to it once and it catches my attention so much that I feel that I need to read it or listen to it again as soon as possible. Exactly that happened to me with Ray Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451.

I listened to it once. I listened to it for the second time shortly after. And, I had to listen to it for the third time a few months later.

Every time I was listening to the story my mouth dropped open any time I realised something new that reflected our current life, some deeper meaning within the lines. And, every time I discovered or realized something new I talked about it with my wife, so she has become quite interested in the story. So, in the end, we bought an online version of the book and started to read it together before we went to sleep.

BTW, reading a good night story is a habit that we built together during the pandemic of Covid and have kept until now. Some couples are watching TV, we are reading books. If you would like to try some new bonding experience with your partner that will not cost you much, you should try this.

What Made Me Read The Story Over And Over Again?

But what it was in Ray Bradbury´s story that caught my attention so much? What was it that made me read the story over and over again?

I felt as if the author foresaw in the story written more than a half-century ago (first time published in 1953) somehow many aspects of our present life. Unfortunately, not the positive aspects of our life.

Bradbury´s dystopian novel tells the story of Guy Montag who works as a fireman. But he is not like the firemen of our time and our world.

Bradbury´s Firemen is an institution that developed from the original firemen but this institution doesn´t put fires out but on the contrary, sets them up. This institution fights with the public enemy number one which is unbelievably books.

Books are in Bradbury´s story illegal, so when the firemen discover someone who keeps them they will burn them together with the house where the books are kept.

The society in Fahrenheit 451 seems at first sight happy and prosperous but not so much at a closer look.

Montag through whose eyes we see the story seems like an ordinary guy who doesn´t do anything else than live in his marriage with his wife Mildred and goes after his fireman job day after day without questioning it.

But one day he meets a new extraordinary girl Clarisse McClellan who just moved to a house in the neighbourhood.

Clarisse talks with Montag any time he is on his way to or from work and during their brief conversations he slowly realizes that there is something wrong with his life. Especially, when Clarisse asks him, if is he happy. Of course, that he is happy. What a silly question from a silly girl! But deep inside he feels that he lies to himself.

Clarisse always surprises him with questions that make him feel uncomfortable or like out of this world. Or she describes to him activities that she likes to do that seem to him pointless. But for some reason, he cannot understand at the beginning he likes their conversations.

She for example smells a dandelion to see if it leaves a mark of pollen on her nose which is as she believes proof that she is loved. Or she describes Montag how sometimes when it rains she opens her mouth and faces up to try to catch raindrops to see how the rain tastes.

Montags´s conversations with Clarisse have a soothing effect on a reader compared with the rest of the story. It makes you feel like the whole world would just stay still and everything is as it is supposed to be.

Their conversations are in direct contrast with the relationship Montag has with his wife Mildred about whom he cannot even recall when they met for the first time.

Mildred represents a sample of society in Bradbury´s world. She is more interested in an illusive world that she can watch through a set of three massive screens and communicate with illusive people on those screens whom she calls her family than in the real world, or even communicating with her husband Montag. Everything out of her fantastic world distress her and makes her anxious. Therefore, she doesn´t want to know anything about how the state is managed and organized, and if the way how it is managed is good or bad. She is not even capable of asking herself that sort of question. Mildred is an empty shell that doesn´t do anything else than eat, sleep, excrete, and feed her mind with neverending junk that helps her to forget that her life is meaningless and without a deeper purpose. She is not however a bad person.

Whenever I read the parts where Montag talks with Mildred I felt upset. Perhaps because she reminds me so much of many people that I can see around nowadays. People are constantly lost in an illusive world of their smartphones that feed their minds with a neverending flood of junk, instead of talking to a real person that sits in front of them or enjoying ordinary events of daily life, such as rain or the smell of flowers as Clarisse McClellan in Bradbury´s story.

The screens in Bradbury´s world are fitted permanently on a wall in a flat but in our real world, those screens follow us everywhere we go, so it sometimes feels like in another good Sci-Fi story The Minority Report written by Philip K. Dick.

The contrast between the way how Mildred and her friends and Clarisse see the world makes you ask yourself if what we have ever learned is the truth. If what THEY are telling us is the truth or just THEIR version of the truth. And, it doesn´t matter who THEY in your case are.

The same sort of questions start to ask Montag, especially after one day when Clarisse disappears without a trace, and when he witnesses at work a woman who burns herself alive together with her books that Montag and his team of firemen come to burn.

He secretly takes away a book from the scene because he starts to wonder what it is about the books that people are willing to die for.

Very soon it turns out that it wasn´t Montag´s first book that he sneaked from a crime scene to bring it home and hide it.

Montag´s Nemesis

Montag´s biggest opponent or antipole is Captain Beatty the chief of the firemen.

Beatty figures out that there is something weird happening with Montag when he makes his wife Mildred make an excuse for him at work that he feels sick after he witnesses the self-burning of an unknown woman with her books.

One of the strongest parts of the story is when Beatty visits Montag at home when he pretends to be sick while hiding the stolen book under his pillow.

Captain Beatty indicates that he knows about the book and is willing to forgive Montag for his minor error and even answer all his questions about books and why firemen started to burn them.

Beatty tells Montag a scary story in which the books weren´t outlawed by any government or another authority, institution etc. but by people themselves. People alone decided to stop reading books because they felt uncomfortable with the thoughts there are written in them and the emotions that they were causing. And, people didn´t want to think. People didn´t want to be bothered any more with someone else difficult thoughts. People just wanted to be HAPPY. And, the firemen were established as protectors of that happiness. Firemen are judges, lawyers and executors in one.

Through our history, we can see what happens when people start to care just for their abundance and so-called happiness at any cost. We can see what happens when people stop questioning how is this abundance achieved turning a blind eye on those that are negatively affected.

We also saw through our history very smart manipulative demagogs that protect their truth and their way of living at any cost. Captain Beatty is from those sorts of people. He is very smart, he knows his enemy (the books), and he is manipulative.

We can see all of that mentioned above even nowadays when our society turns a blind eye to problems that we are facing, such as global environmental changes for a just bit longer feeling of joy and illusionary never-ending economic growth and prosperity where everyone lives an abundant and happy life.

The Turning Point

Bradbury´s story has quite a dramatic turning point during which Montag´s wife Mildred turns him into Captain Beatty’s claws after he cannot deal anymore with the numbness and emptiness of his wife and her friends that came over to visit them. One of the visitors for example stated during a conversation that having children is not difficult that it is like washing laundry. She just seats them in front of a screen and turns a switch.

I must say that this vision has shaken me deeply into my roots. Without criticising anyone
I must ask you, how many times you have witnessed something like that happen with nowadays children whose parents sit them in front of a screen or pass them a smartphone to make them quiet instead of interacting with them?

Montag in a rage that overcomes him reads out of a book of poetry which upsets their visitors and makes them run away from their house. As a result of this action, Mildred reports him to Captain Beatty and leaves him, and Montag is forced to burn his own house together with the books that he was hiding.

Captain Beatty is however not satisfied just with that kind of humiliation and continues teasing Montag who is at the moment armed with a flame-thrower. Beatty´s end is inevitable. He ends as the saying goes: “Don’t irritate a snake with a barefoot”. Montag burns Beatty alive with the flame-thrower saying that he learned his lesson that they should burn their problems.

Sort of Happy End

Although Bradbury´s story ends with massive destruction during a bombardment of the city it doesn´t end negatively.

Montag is chased through the city full of superspeed cars by other firemen and robotic hunts that firemen use to track down their prey after killing Captain Beatty and saving his own life by jumping into a river before he is caught.

Then, in a forest behind the city he meets other outlawed people like himself, which gives him hope for a positive change that one day might come.

The leader of the group explains to him that the system of the state wasn´t afraid of the books themselves as the objects but of what books contain. Firemen and people like Mildred were afraid of thoughts that were hidden in the books.
The people who represented the state in Bradbury´s book were afraid that the thoughts in the books would make people question the way how the state is managed. It would make them question their own life which would inevitably lead to unhappiness and call for a change. And, quite clearly that´s the last thing that someone who holds power wants.

The Conclusion

There is no denying that my view of Bradbury´s story is very subjective and what I see in the story you might not see. You might see something different. And, it is alright.

To see every aspect of the author´s creation I would need for example consider the historical influence under which Bradbury wrote the story. It was quite shortly after the Second World War during which Nacci Germany burned a lot of books because they were afraid of thoughts that people might find in them and oppose their philosophy.

Of course, we must not forget that books were burned many times throughout human history.

Bradbury also wrote his story under back then new historical fact which was the beginning of the Cold World War.

That and much more I would need to consider reflecting Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

But on the other hand, a book is just a book. A story is just a story. And it´s up to everyone what will take out of it as long as will not forget that sometimes is good to just close the book and as Clarisse McClellan to go out to enjoy the happiness of our life in daily seemingly ordinary events, such as the Sun on clear blue sky, the taste of rain, the smell of dandelions, singing of the birds etc.

George