Fahrenheit 451 Test Notes
- 1. Fahrenheit 451 “…government is best that governs least…” Right? Ray Bradbury
- 2. Dorothy Thompson: “When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.”
- 3. Fahrenheit 451 The temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns…”
- 4. Characters Guy Montag Mildred Montag Clarisse McClellan Capt. Beatty Professor Faber Granger
- 5. Guy Montag 1. Central character Realizes the emptiness of his life 2. About 30 years old and starts to search for meaning in 3. Has been a “fireman” for 10 the books he is supposed to be years burning He is sometimes rash and has a 4. 3rd generation “fireman” hard time thinking for himself 5. Appropriately named after a He is determined to break free paper-manufacturing company from the oppression of ignorance
- 6. Mildred Montag Montag’s brittle, sickly looking wife the one major character in the book She is obsessed with watching television who seems to have no hope of resolving and refuses to engage in frank the conflicts within herself. conversation with her husband about Bradbury portrays Mildred as a shell of their marriage or her feelings a human being, devoid of any sincere Small-minded and childish, Mildred does emotional, intellectual, or spiritual not understand her husband and substance. Her only attachment is to apparently has no desire to do so. the “family” in the soap opera she watches
- 7. Capt. Beatty The captain of Montag’s fire A complex character, full of contradictions department His role as a character is complicated Extremely well-read, paradoxically by the fact that Bradbury uses him to he hates books and people who do so much explication of the novel’s insist on reading them. background. In his shrewd He is cunning and devious, and so observations of the world around him and his lack of any attempt to prevent perceptive that he appears to read his own death, he becomes too Montag’s thoughts. sympathetic to function as a pure villain.
- 8. Professor Faber A retired English professor whom Named after a famous publisher, Montag encountered a year before the Faber competes with Beatty in the book opens. struggle for Montag’s mind Faber still possesses a few precious Faber’s role and motivations are books and aches to have more complex: at times he tries to help admits that the current state of Montag think independently and at society is due to the cowardice of other times he tries to dominate people like himself, who would not him. Similarly, he can be cowardly speak out against book burning when and heroic by turns. they still could have stopped it.
- 9. Clarisse McClellan An outcast from society because of Beautiful 17-year old her odd habits, which include Introduces Montag to the hiking, playing with flowers, and asking questions, but she and her world’s potential for beauty (equally odd) family seem and meaning with her gentle genuinely happy with themselves innocence and curiosity and each other.
- 10. Granger The leader of the “Book He is committed to People,” the group of hobo preserving literature intellectuals Montag finds in through the current Dark the country. Age. Granger is intelligent, patient, and confident in the strength of the human spirit
- 11. Mrs. Phelps & Mrs. Bowles MRS. PHELPS One of Mildred’s vapid friends. MRS. BOWLES She is emotionally One of Mildred’s friends. Like Mrs. disconnected from her life, Phelps, she does not seem to care appearing unconcerned when deeply about her own miserable life, which includes one divorce, one her third husband is sent off to husband killed in an accident, one war. Yet she breaks down husband who commits suicide, and crying when Montag reads her two children who hate her. Both of a poem, revealing suppressed Mildred’s friends are represented as feelings and sensibilities typical specimens of their society.
- 12. “It was a pleasure to burn.”
- 13. Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work Censorship Knowledge versus Ignorance
- 14. CENSORSHIP 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: 1. factors that lead to a general lack of interest in reading 2. factors that make people actively hostile toward books. The novel doesn’t clearly distinguish these two developments. Apparently, they simply support one another.
- 15. Group 1 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.
- 16. Group 2 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. Bradbury is careful to refrain from referring specifically to racial minorities—Beatty mentions dog lovers and cat lovers, for instance. The reader can only try to infer which special- interest groups he really has in mind.
- 17. Equality Vs. Sameness Since everyone is NOT created equally, the government must make everyone the same. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” is an example.
- 18. 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.
- 19. Ray Bradbury: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
- 20. MOTIFS: Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes Paradoxes Animal and Nature Imagery Religion
- 21. PARADOXES Apparent contradictions Paradoxes are used to question the reality of beings that are apparently living but spiritually dead. Ultimately, Mildred and the rest of her society seem to be not much more than machines, thinking only what they are told to think. The culture of Fahrenheit 451 is a culture of insubstantiality and unreality, and Montag desperately seeks more substantial truths in the books he hoards.
- 22. Animal and Nature Imagery Animal and nature imagery pervades the novel. Nature is presented as a force of innocence and truth, beginning with Clarisse’s adolescent, reverent love for nature. She convinces Montag to taste the rain, and the experience changes him irrevocably. His escape from the city into the country is a revelation to him, showing him the enlightening power of unspoiled nature. 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.
- 23. RELIGION Fahrenheit 451 contains a number of religious references. Mildred’s friends remind Montag of icons he once saw in a church and did not understand. A reference is made to several other Biblical happenings including the water into blood. . In the biblical story, Jesus Christ’s transformation of water into wine was one of the miracles that proved his identity and instilled faith in his role as the savior. Montag longs to confirm his own identity through a similar self-transformation.
- 24. The references to fire are more complex. In the Christian tradition, fire has several meanings: from the pagan blaze in which the golden calf was made to Moses’ burning bush, it symbolizes both blatant heresy and divine presence. Fire in Fahrenheit 451 also possesses contradictory meanings. At the beginning it is the vehicle of a restrictive society, but Montag turns it upon his oppressor and win his freedom.
- 25. Finally, Bradbury uses language and imagery from the Bible to resolve the novel. In the last pages, as Montag and Granger’s group walk upriver to find survivors after the bombing of the city, Montag knows they will eventually talk, and he tries to remember appropriate passages from the Bible.
- 26. He brings to mind Ecclesiastes 3:1, “To everything there is a season,” and also Revelations 22:2, “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life . . . and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations,” which he decides to save for when they reach the city.
- 27. The verse from Revelations also speaks of the holy city of God, and the last line of the book, “When we reach the city,” implies a strong symbolic connection between the atomic holocaust of Montag’s world and the Apocalypse of the Bible
- 28. Franklin D. Roosevelt “The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough to maintain its sovereign control over the government.”
- 29. Symbols Blood “The Hearth and the Salamander” “The Sieve and the Sand” The Phoenix Mirrors
- 30. Blood Blood appears throughout the novel Bradbury uses the electronic device to as a symbol of a human being’s reveal Mildred’s corrupted insides and repressed soul or primal, instinctive the thick sediment of delusion, misery, self. and self-hatred within her. The Snake Ex: The replacement of Mildred’s has explored “the layer upon layer of diseased blood with fresh blood. night and stone and stagnant spring Mildred, whose primal self has been water,” but its replacement of her blood irretrievably lost, remains unchanged could not rejuvenate her soul. Her when her poisoned blood is replaced poisoned, replaceable blood signifies with fresh, mechanically administered the empty lifelessness of Mildred and blood by the Electric-Eyed Snake the countless others like her. machine.
- 31. “The Hearth and the Salamander” Bradbury uses this conjunction of images as the title of the first part of Fahrenheit 451. The hearth, or fireplace, is a traditional symbol of the home; the salamander is one of the official symbols of the firemen, as well as the name they give to their fire trucks. Both of these symbols have to do with fire, the dominant image of Montag’s life—the hearth because it contains the fire that heats a home, and the salamander because of ancient beliefs that it lives in fire and is unaffected by flames
- 32. “The Sieve and the Sand” The title of the second part of Fahrenheit 451, “The Sieve and the Sand,” is taken from Montag’s childhood memory of trying to fill a sieve with sand on the beach to get a dime from a mischievous cousin and crying at the uselessness of the task. He compares this memory to his attempt to read the whole Bible as quickly as possible on the subway in the hope that, if he reads fast enough, some of the material will stay in his memory. Simply put, the sand is a symbol of the tangible truth Montag seeks, and the sieve the human mind seeking a truth that remains elusive and, the metaphor suggests, impossible to grasp in any permanent way.
- 33. The Phoenix After the bombing of the city, Granger compares mankind to a phoenix that burns itself up and then rises out of its ashes over and over again. Man’s advantage is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake, so that eventually he will learn not to make that mistake anymore. Remembering the mistakes of the past is the task Granger and his group have set for themselves. They believe that individuals are not as important as the collective mass of culture and history. The symbol of the phoenix’s rebirth refers not only to the cyclical nature of history and the collective rebirth of humankind but also to Montag’s spiritual resurrection.
- 34. Mirrors At the very end of the novel, Granger says they must build a mirror factory to take a long look at themselves; this remark recalls Montag’s description of Clarisse as a mirror in “The Hearth and the Salamander.” Mirrors here are symbols of self- understanding, of seeing oneself clearly.
- 35. Most Commonly Challenged Books A Wrinkle in Time: Madeleine L’Engle To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee Their Eyes were Watching God : Zora Neale Hurston 1984: Beorge Orwell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer : Mark Twain Beloved and The Bluest Eye: Toni Morrison Brave New World: Aldous Huxley
- 36. The Catcher in the Rye: John Go Ask Alice: Anonymous Salinger Goosebumps (series): R.L. Catch-22: Joseph Heller Stine The Chocolate War: Robert Harry Potter (series): J.K. Cormier Rowling A Day No Pigs Would Die: The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Robert Newton Peck Fitzgerald Flowers for Algernon: Daniel Julie of the Wolves: Jean Keyes Craighead George The Giver: Lois Lowry Lord of the Flies: William Golding
- 37. My Brother Sam is Dead : Summer of my German Soldier: James Lincoln Collier & Bette Greene Christopher Collier The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Of Mice and Men: John Hemingway Steinbeck Are you There God? It’s Me, The Outsiders and That Margaret & Blubber: Judy Blume Was Then, This is Now: S.E. Hinton Black Boy: Richard Wright The Pigman: Paul Zindel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Slaughterhouse-5: Kurt Maya Angelou Vonnegut
- 38. Mississippi School District Bans Book on Censorship: "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury February 1, 1999 West Marion High School in Foxworth, a rural Mississippi town, is the place where recent events aimed at censorship occurred. The book, Fahenreit 451, was on the reading list for several of the English classes. However, after a parent complained to the superintendent about the use of the word "God damn" in the book, the book was removed from the required reading list. Interestingly, the complaint did not surface until the book report was due -- more than a month after the reading assignment was given.
- 39. Banned YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO READ THESE BOOKS! Go ahead… I DARE YOU!