Burn the Life Unlived!: Ray Bradbury’s "Fahrenheit 451" (Part 1)

“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, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel. (51)

The words caught in a glimpse stamp themselves into his mind. From this point on, he starts to question the validity and point of his work. Prior to this event, Montag’s rigid world has already been upset by two other events: 1. A teenage girl asking him if he is happy doing what he does. 2. The sleeping pill overdose of his catatonic wife. The reader learns that Montag is becoming disillusioned with life. His marriage and occupation can no longer contain his complacency. The onslaught of the books and its effect on him are therefore not happenstance. Disturbed by the event, Montag finds himself re-evaluating the worth of books. In a conversation with his wife, he says, “You weren’t there, you didn’t see … There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there” (68). His wife refuses to see his point – unsurprising to the reader, given that she is one of the many who are addicted to an interactive soap opera on the “parlour walls” (three-way giant television screens), and cannot imagine why anyone would want to risk one’s life by possessing something as worthless as books. It is through Montag’s chief, Beatty, that we learn why books have been bastardised. One of the reasons is eerily contemporary: for the sake of convenience:

“Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils downs to the gag, the snap ending… Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary résumé… But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet … was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours … Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” (72)

Beatty’s prescience is disconcerting. What is being said here very much applies to the world of 2012, where the internet has conditioned our collective mind to digest only the simple and the speedy. Who has the time, not to mention patience, to pore through Crime and Punishment or Remembrance of Things Past when a few clicks of the keyboard will lead one to the most comprehensive of synopses and analyses? [*] Our bottomless need for convenience is not the only reason for the obsolescence of books. There is a much more iniquitous cause: paranoid political correctness:

“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy … A book is a loaded gun in the house next door, Burn it … Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? … Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it … Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag.” (77-8)

The destruction of books is therefore a preventive act, designed to create (artificial) equality and to impose an all-flattening political correctness that will ensure peace of mind. Reading is judged to be capable of inciting violence; it can cause the reader to “blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority” (137). Bradbury’s vision here is also uncannily accurate. The world we inhabit is regulated by unspoken rules of political correctness, the flouting of which could cause the offender to be pilloried. Our society has not attempted to burn all books, but for Bradbury the burning of books is a mere metaphor. What is at stake here is the freedom of thought and expression.

[*] English writer Will Self famously criticises educators who are guilty of oversimplifying the learning process: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17777556

Link to Part 2: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/12/burn-life-unlived-ray-bradburys_14.html

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. London: Harper Voyager, 2008.