Overview

Called “the book for our social media age” by the New York Times, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a gripping story that is at once disturbing and poetic. Bradbury takes the materials of pulp fiction and transforms them into a visionary parable of a society gone awry, in which firemen burn books and the state suppresses learning. Fahrenheit 451 is a “masterpiece … everyone should read” (Boston Globe). “Brilliant … startling and ingenious. Mr. Bradbury’s account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating” (New York Times). Bradbury is “one of this country’s most beloved writers” (Washington Post).

Introduction to the Book

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.” – from Fahrenheit 451

The three main sections of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 all end in fire. The novel focuses on Guy Montag, a fireman who, in the first section, we discover is a professional book burner, expected to start fires instead of putting them out. For years he has done his job obediently and well, and finds a “special pleasure” in burning books (p.1). Then one day, he is called upon to burn the books of a Mrs. Hudson, who prefers to die rather than leave her library. Furtively, Montag pockets some of her books, haunted by the idea that a life without books might not be worth living after all.

As Montag begins to read deeply for the first time in his life, Fahrenheit 451's second section traces his growing dissatisfaction with the society without books he is paid to defend. He seeks out the counsel of an old man named Faber, whom he once let off easy on a reading charge. Together they agree to copy a salvaged Bible, in case anything should happen to the original.

Montag's boss at the firehouse, Beatty, senses his disenchantment and interrogates him until their confrontation is interrupted by a fire call. Responding to the address, Montag is expected to start a conflagration considerably closer to home.

Fahrenheit 451's final section finds Montag seizing his own fate for the first time. He avenges himself on Beatty and strikes out for the countryside. There he finds a resistance force of readers, each one responsible for memorizing—and thereby preserving—the entire contents of a different book. As they bide their time in hope of a better future, a flash appears on the horizon: While society was staring at full-wall television screens and medicating itself into a coma, the largest fire yet has broken out.

The book's three holocausts expand concentrically. The death of a stranger by fire in the first third becomes the destruction of Montag's own house in the second. The implication is that, had Montag paid greater attention to his neighbor's plight, he might not have found himself in the same predicament soon afterward. Trouble down the street leads to trouble at home, and trouble at home to trouble abroad.

Literary Allusions in Fahrenheit 451

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

A precursor to Granger's philosophy in Fahrenheit 451, Thoreau's classic account of the time he spent in a cabin on Walden Pond has inspired generations of iconoclasts to spurn society and take to the wilderness.

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Swift's satirical 1726 novel follows the journey of Lemuel Gulliver to a series of fanciful islands, none more improbable than the England he left behind. The Bradburian idea of using a distant world as a mirror to reflect the flaws of one's own society doesn't originate here, but this is one early expression of it.

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold

Arnold's enduring poem about a seascape where "ignorant armies clash by night" has also lent lines to Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, and provided the title for Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night.

The Republic by Plato

The deathless allegory of the cave, where men living in darkness perceive shadows as truth, is unmistakably echoed in the world of Fahrenheit 451.

Ramin Bahrami on Adapting and Directing Fahrenheit 451 (Art Works Blog, 6/8/18)