Stranger on Earth

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/12/burn-life-unlived-ray-bradburys.html Bradbury himself once remarked in an interview that Fahrenheit 451 was not a writer’s protest against totalitarianism. [+] The fact that the novel is often interpreted as such speaks volumes about its multi-facetedness. The writer’s intention, however, lies in a different sphere: he aims to alert the reader to the soul-flattening addictiveness of visual media and their threat to the existence of books. When Montag encounters the novel’s chief voice of reason Faber, who has an extensive literary knowledge, he learns from him the true worth of books. In reference to the last surviving copy of the Bible Montag has stolen and kept, Faber says: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture, This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. Yo...

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” says one of the outlaws to our protagonist Guy Montag before the novel ends, “live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world” (201). Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1958) is traditionally considered a novel about a dystopian society à la 1984 that has made books and the act of reading illegal. But upon closer examination it reveals a message that is even more sweeping than the one above: one of living one’s life to its full capacity. Guy Montag, a fireman who has spent his whole life burning books and the houses of transgressors, has a sudden awakening when he is on the job. Seemingly out of the fiery red (not blue) he develops a sense of guilt, and books, objects he has never particularly cared for, begin to prey on his mind: Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms … A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, ...