Ray bradburys outlook of the f
Ray bradburys outlook of the fRay Bradbury’s Outlook of the Future
Just by reading the first few lines of the opening paragraph of Fahrenheit 451, we get the feeling of a dystopia right away. Firemen burning books, instead of putting out fires that start in homes. Who ever heard of that? This is crazy thinking right off the start, yet Bradbury carries us through as if we are travelers to this time and place. We are the unseen eyes that see the cataclysmic events that turn Guy Montag’s life upside down. We watch him rise, then fall, then meet with outsiders like himself. We watch, how fugitives are tracked down using a mechanical dog, and how people love to watch the chase on their “off the wall” television sets. Could this be how Bradbury thinks our society is going to turn into? Maybe not as drastic, but maybe the censorship could happen, couldn’t it?
Ray Bradbury is compared to Arthur C. Clarke as a “poetic science fiction writer” (Watt). This is so, because Bradbury takes a more elegant path to laying out his dystopia. People in his story are so into the now, and pleasure for the moment, that they forget the morals and ethics they came from, because they are clouded by smoke. Take for instance the wall-sized televisions. This became the populace’s way of interacting with others with out physically interacting with them. People on TV were your “family”, who would keep you company and be your “friend”. Still, a place where books were burned and houses were supposedly “fireproof”, you have to admit this world is out of whack. If we look at Montag’s wife for instance, we see how entrenched people have become into just being happy, and not carrying for what happens to the ideas that are in books. I think Bradbury is trying to tell us not to rely to heavily on technology or it will consume us. In the future we may take books for granted, because they are the essence of free speech, and free ideologies. By have the books burned, people forget, and have nothing to trace back, only leaving what is now.
While critics...
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