Transcript Farenheit 451 - Rochester Community Schools

Fahrenheit
451
By
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Bradbury honed his sci-fi sensibility
writing for popular television shows,
including Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and The Twilight Zone.
His book The Martian Chronicles,
published in 1950, established his
reputation as a leading American
writer of science fiction.
In the spring of 1950, while
living with his family in a
humble home in Venice,
California, Bradbury began
writing what was to become
Fahrenheit 451 on pay-bythe-hour typewriters in the
University of California at
Los Angeles library
basement.
He finished the first draft, a
shorter version called The
Fireman, in just nine days.
Plot Overview
Guy Montag is a fireman who burns books in a
futuristic American city. In Montag’s world,
firemen start fires rather than putting them out.
The people in this society do not read books,
enjoy nature, spend time by themselves, think
independently, or have meaningful conversations.
Instead, they drive very fast, watch excessive
amounts of television on wall-size sets, and listen
to the radio on “Seashell Radio” sets attached to
their ears.
Dystopian Society
Characteristics of a Dystopian Society
Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society.
Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted.
A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the
society.
Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance.
Citizens have a fear of the outside world.
Citizens live in a dehumanized state.
The natural world is banished and distrusted.
Citizens conform to uniform expectations. Individuality and
dissent are bad.
The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world.
Types of Dystopian Controls
Most dystopian works present a world in
which oppressive societal control and the
illusion of a perfect society are maintained
through one or more of the following types
of controls:
– Corporate control: One or more large
corporations control society through products,
advertising, and/or the media. Examples
include Minority Report and Running Man.
Bureaucratic control: Society is controlled by a
mindless bureaucracy through a tangle of red
tape, relentless regulations, and incompetent
government officials. Examples in film include
Brazil.
Technological control: Society is controlled by
technology—through computers, robots, and/or
scientific means. Examples include The Matrix,
The Terminator, and I, Robot.
Philosophical/religious control: Society is
controlled by philosophical or religious ideology
often enforced through a dictatorship or
theocratic government.
The Dystopian Protagonist
often feels trapped and is struggling to escape.
questions the existing social and political
systems.
believes or feels that something is terribly wrong
with the society in which he or she lives.
helps the audience recognizes the negative
aspects of the dystopian world through his or her
perspective.
Themes
Censorship- Knowledge vs. Ignorance
Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t provide a single, clear
explanation of why books are banned in the future.
Instead, it suggests that many different factors could
combine to create this result.
These factors can be broken into two groups: factors
that lead to a general lack of interest in reading and
factors that make people actively hostile toward
books.
The novel doesn’t clearly distinguish these two
developments. Apparently, they simply support one
another.
The first group of factors includes the
popularity of competing forms of
entertainment such as television and
radio.
More broadly, Bradbury thinks that
the presence of fast cars, loud music,
and advertisements creates a lifestyle
with too much stimulation in which no
one has the time to concentrate.
Also, the huge mass of published
material is too overwhelming to think
about, leading to a society that reads
condensed books (which were very
popular at the time Bradbury was
writing) rather than the real thing.
The second group of factors, those that
make people hostile toward books,
involves envy. People don’t like to feel
inferior to those who have read more than
they have.
But the novel implies that the most
important factor leading to censorship is
the objections of special-interest groups
and “minorities” to things in books that
offend them.
Knowledge versus Ignorance
Montag, Faber, and Beatty’s struggle
revolves around the tension between
knowledge and ignorance.
The fireman’s duty is to destroy knowledge and
promote ignorance in order to equalize the
population and promote sameness.
Montag’s encounters with Clarisse, the old woman,
and Faber ignite in him the spark of doubt about this
approach. His resultant search for knowledge
destroys the unquestioning ignorance he used to
share with nearly everyone else, and he battles the
basic beliefs of his society.
Paradoxes
A paradox is a seemingly true
statement or group of
statements that lead to a
contradiction or a situation
which seems to defy logic or
intuition.
Paradoxes
One of literature's arguably most famous
paradoxes is the Miltonic narrator's
statement in Book One of 'Paradise Lost',
that the fires of hell emit 'no light, but
darkness visible.' Statements such as
Wilde's "I can resist anything except
temptation", Chesterton's "Spies do not look
like spies" and Polonius' observation in
Hamlet that "though this be madness, yet
there is method in't" are examples of
rhetorical paradox. The best example of
paradox is the first paragraph of Charles
Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities.
Animal and Nature Imagery
Animal and nature imagery
pervades the novel. Nature is
presented as a force of innocence
and truth.
Much of the novel’s animal
imagery is ironic. Although this
society is obsessed with
technology and ignores nature,
many frightening mechanical
devices are modeled after or
named for animals, such as the
Electric-Eyed Snake machine and
the Mechanical Hound.
What is science fiction?
Science fiction is a form that deals
principally with the impact of actual or
imagined science upon society or
individuals.
If science concerns itself with discovery,
then science fiction concerns itself with the
consequences of discovery.
It is a testament to the visionary nature of
the form that science fiction writers
predicted the advent of atomic weapons
and sentient machines.
Its enduring value though is in its
capacity to ask probing questions of each
new scientific advance, to conduct a
dialogue with progress that decodes its
real meaning and reveals it to us.
Burning Bright
An excerpt from a foreword to the fortieth Anniversary Edition
of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury February 14, 1993
“….a prediction that my fire Chief, Beatty, made in 1953, halfway through my book. It
had to do with books being burned without matches or fire. Because you don’t have
to burn books, do you, if the world starts to fill up with nonreaders, non-learners, nonknowers? If the world wide-screen-basketballs and footballs itself to drown in MTV, no
Beattys are needed to ignite the kerosene or hunt the reader. If the primary grades
suffer meltdown and vanish through the cracks and ventilators of the schoolroom,
who, after a while, will know or care?
All is not lost, of course. There is still time if we judge teachers, students, and
parents, hold them accountable on the same scale, if we truly test teachers, students,
and parents, if we make everyone responsible for quality, if we insure that by the end
of its sixth year every child in every country can live in libraries to learn almost by
osmosis, then our drug, street-gang, rape, and murder scores will suffer themselves
near zero.
But the Fire Chief, in midnovel, says it all, predicting the one-minute TV commercial
with three images per second and no respite from the bombardment. Listen to him,
know what he says, then go sit with your child, open a book, and turn the page.”
The Red Scare
Black Listing
“The government has a history of controlling the reading habits of Americans.
The FBI’s ‘Library Awareness Program’ sought to ‘recruit librarians as
counter intelligence assets to monitor suspicious library users and report
their reading habits to the FBI.’ When the American Library Association (ALA)
learned of this, its Intellectual
Freedom Committee issued an advisory statement warning that libraries are
not ‘extensions of the long arm of the law or of the gaze of Big Brother…’
Another ALA memo chastised the FBI for its efforts to ‘convert library
circulation records into ‘suspect lists’…’ The program was eventually ended,
or so says the FBI.”
Foerstel, H. Library Surveillance: The FBI’s Library Awareness Program
(1991)
More & More - People clamor for technology: faster computers, faster connections to internet,
computerized “chat rooms” that enable us to “speak” to faceless strangers, more
comprehensive cell phone networks, pagers, more powerful cars, voice mail, palm pilots, etc.
People seem petrified of wasting time.
Bradbury believed that the presence of fast cars, loud music, and a constant barrage of
advertisements created a life with far too much stimulation in which no one had the time or
ability to concentrate. Further, he felt people regarded the huge mass of published material as
too overwhelming, leading to a society that read condensed books (very
popular at the time Bradbury was writing) rather than the real thing.
Average time per week that
the American child ages 217 spends watching
television:
19 hours and 40 minutes
Age by which
children develop
brand loyalty: 2
Years old
Percentage of children
ages 8-16 who have a
TV in their bedroom:
56%
“Television is a chewing gum for the Eyes.” Frank Lloyd Wright
Number of TV
commercials viewed by
American children a
year: 20,000
“The remarkable thing about TV
is that it permits several million
people to laugh at the same
joke and still I feel lonely.”
T.S. Eliot
About Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 is a social criticism that warns
against the danger of suppressing thought through
censorship.
Fahrenheit 451 uses the conventions of science
fiction to convey the message that oppressive
government, left unchecked, does irreparable
damage to society by curtailing the creativity and
freedom of its people.
The "dystopia” motif, popular in science fiction that of a technocratic and totalitarian society that
demands order at the expense of individual rights is central to the novel.
Developed in the years immediately following World War II,
Fahrenheit 451 condemns not only the anti intellectualism of Nazi
Germany, but more immediately America in the early 1950's - the
heyday of McCarthyism.
On a more personal level, Bradbury used Fahrenheit 451 as a
means of protesting what he believed to be the invasiveness of
editors who, through their strict control of the books they printed,
impaired the originality and
creativity of writers.
Ironically, Fahrenheit 451, itself a vehicle of protest against
censorship, has often been edited for foul language.
The Library of Congress recently designated this best-known book
of Bradbury’s as one of the top 100 works of American literature.
Symbolism:
· Part one of the book entitled The Earth and The Salamander: a salamander is
known to endure fire without getting burned. A salamander is therefore symbolic of
Montag, because he works with fire and endures it. Montag believes he can escape
the fire and survive, much like a salamander.
· The symbol of a Phoenix is used throughout the novel. A Phoenix is a multicolored
bird from Arabian myth. At the end of its 500-year existence, it perches on its nest of
spices and sings until sunlight ignites its body. After the body is consumed, a worm
emerges and develops into the next Phoenix. This symbolizes both the rebirth
after destruction by fire and the cyclical nature of things. Firemen wear the Phoenix
on their uniforms and Beatty drives a Phoenix car. Montag, after realizing that fire
has destroyed him, wishes to be “reborn.” Granger, one of Fahrenheit 451’s
characters, said: “ There was a silly damn bird called Phoenix back
before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must
have been first cousin to Man.”
Hedonism is a school of thought
which argues that pleasure is the
only intrinsic good.[1] This is often
used as a justification for evaluating
actions in terms of how much
pleasure and how little pain (i.e.
suffering) they produce. In very
simple terms, a hedonist strives to
maximize this net pleasure (pleasure
minus pain).
1950’s Statistics
Number of viewers who watched
Eisenhower’s inaugration: 29 million
Number who watched “I Love Lucy”
the night before: 44 million
Retail record sales in 1954: $182
million
Sales in 1960: $520 million
Percent of persons arrested in 1959
under the age of 25: 60%
1950’s Statistics
Spending on advertising in 1950:
$5.7 billion
In 1960: $11.9 billion
Number of television sets in the US
in 1946: 7,000
Number is 1960: 50 million