This doesn’t mean the books don’t have value. Then the story balloons that issue or ideology to the point where it becomes totalitarian in its expression. They find one aspect about life and human existence that functions as a hiccup or hypocrisy. As he pours over the volumes, he questions his identity and society he even starts to conspire how he might undermine it.ĭystopian science fiction books are, by their nature, fairly adolescent and melodramatic. He is curious why people destroy their lives and stockpile these strange antique texts. When Guy starts having an unforeseen crisis of conscience, he finds himself stealing a handful of books from work. The Fireman’s job is to destroy homes filled with books and arrest their owners for crimes against the state. Houses of the future are mostly fireproof. Guy works as a Fireman in a world where that term has taken on a very different meaning. Set against the far-off dystopian nightmare world of 1999 (roughly 40 years in the future from the time of publication), we meet our lead character of Guy Montag. The premise is beyond famous at this point. In reality, Fahrenheit 451 has a more personal, angry target for its polemic deconstruction – us. People read it as a metaphor for all sorts of contemporary events and tend to sort the story on partisan lines, a means of proclaiming OUR enemies as “book burning fascists and puritans.” This novel is one of the most famous science fiction novels of the 20th century, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood novels of its century. The modern emotional distance to the concept, that book burning could effectively destroy an idea, makes reading a book like Fahrenheit 451 a bit challenging. Many classic works of European literature have been nearly lost to history because of prolific book-burning efforts. If you burn enough heretical material, the ideas “theoretically” could go away forever. Book Burnings, like the infamous bonfire of the vanities in 1497 or the Nazi burnings in 1930s Germany, served a very specific purpose. Thanks to the Internet, every book in existence is available online in PDF form.

It’s a scathingly angry bit of fiction that uses an esoteric and specific topic for its central conceit – Book Burning.īook Burning is something our society can’t viscerally understand anymore.

An adolescent rage underpins the novel and its extensive fear of totalitarian dystopia. The story relies on a very unlikely scenario that feels a hair disconnected from any level of reality. Ray Bradberry’s Fahrenheit 451 has an element that I chalk up to immature melodrama.

Fahrenheit 451 year