fahrenhiet 451 book review

this story is set in a future where everything and everyone are drenched in despair and desolation. meet, guy montag, he is a fireman and their job is setting fires to homes that contain an ancient commodity called books. guy montag burns these books and homes every night. he doesn't even know that he doesn't want to do it until a young girl named clarisse mcclellan tips guy into his breaking point. he starts seeing the truth and asking questions that were meant to be asked a long time ago. what is really interesting to me is the portrayal of people. They became more disconnected with each other to the point where they will only care about their own comfort. they are not equipped with emotions to ponder why and how. housewives only care about digital talk shows, i might even stretch the narrative and say - augmented reality systems at every home, controlled by mass corporates to keep everyone occupied with senseless things in every waking minute of their life. children who kill pedastrians for fun. cars moving at high speed so the billboards are elongated to 20ft wide to compensate the clarity of advertisements. bombings at every night on every street but no one stops to question anything because the official news coverage has been moved to radio, and radio has became old-fashioned. So no one even watches news to know what is going on beyond their homes. anyone who dares to question, to think for themselves and for the society is outcasted. theres a particular line that really encapsulates the idea of the book. this scene happens when guy montag meets with the 'book people' who are scholars in the old times who work towards preserving the knowledge of books orally in their minds. One of the central character of the book people group who live on the outskirts of the city called Granger says these lines: “And when the war’s over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.” This leads us to the central theme of the novel: Destruction and creation. The only way out of this vicious cycle is the recognition of history that happened before us and to do that, we need books. Ray bradbury notes the importance of preserving knowledge of the past generation. Without books we wouldn't be doing the same damn mistake over and over again. And i quote again from granger, this line has a more hopeful take - “There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. ... And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over ... But we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did ... as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.” I highly recommend reading or listening to the audiobook of this novel. do check it out when you're interested.

Posted on: 12:26 AM August 17, 2025