I really liked the book Fahrenheit 451 so much so that I added it to my favorite books on Facebook. A lot of good points are made in the book and they can all be connected to our world in one way or another. Obviously, book burning is the main one. The society of Fahrenheit 451 may seem a lot different in how things are run and how extreme the book burning is but it’s not far off actually. In fact, today book burning is a very serious problem. And although book burning in Fahrenheit 451 is the actual torching of books, it is this and more in our society. The editing and political correctness is our main form of book burning. If all the meaningful words are taken out of a book, the ones that make it mean one thing with them and another without them, you are changing that book. In essence you are ridding the book of it’s original meaning. This in its own way is ‘burning’ the book. Some authors of books have become so frustrated with this that they just recall their books, preventing the editing of them in the first place.
We can also look at political correctness in our society. By not being able to express things as they are, it can completely change their original meaning. We hear it on the news, when the president speaks, etc. You hear things like “the alleged attackers” and you say to yourself, “We know they were terrorists so why didn’t he just say that?” Personally, it drives me insane. Complicating things further by using more words makes things worse. It hides the truth from the people and pulls a mask over the public.
This is exactly what happens in Fahrenheit 451. By burning books, those ideas and the knowledge in them disappear. A limited range of thought is one that is more controllable. Fahrenheit 451’s society shows this as did other comparable societies in the books we read like “1984” and “Feed”.
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14 years ago
I agree about our societies modern way of burning books. Censorship is alive and well and eeks like a serpent in our tv, radio, and print. Bradbury vents about the same thing in "CODA" the afterword in the novel.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you tied in how our society actually burns book too, but by editing and etc. I also liked how you tied this novel into the other novels we read like 1984, and Feed, and I also see a lot fo similarities in them!
ReplyDeleteYeah it drives me crazy too when people sensor things. I also think that the more we hear about these things the more they become comfortable to us. We hear about terrorist and alleged attacks all the time. So, when we hear that now we are just like "ohh wow another attack." Things just don't effect us the same way they used to.
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