Fahrenheit 451Essay Preview: Fahrenheit 451Report this essayIn the science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury predicts a futuristic society, much like our society today. Although it was written in 1953, Bradbury seems to foresee many traits present in our modern world today.
We live in a fast paced, technological world today. We are consumed with technology and want everything faster and better; faster Internet, faster phones, faster ways to work, so that we have more time for leisure. However, most people do not choose to read for fun anymore; most books are made into movies and people find that seeing the movie is faster and more entertaining than sitting down and reading the book. Captain Beatty says in his society, “Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests,Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” page 52 “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 resume.” page 52 Today, people are glued to the TV, computers, cell phones or playing video games. If you look around at a restaurant next time you are dining out, you will see at least one person at every table using their cell phone. TV is even used as a babysitter these days for busy parents. Children end up learning the alphabet by playing video games rather than reading a book and this type of learning takes away imagination and independent thinking, just as Captain Beatty explains, “With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word intellectual, of course, became a swear word it deserved to be.” page 55
Censorship is common practice today for TV networks. All movies are edited to make sure no one is offended. TV and radio shows are also edited and only approved content is allowed during certain times of the day. TV shows are geared to what we like and what we dont like. This is similar to the way Beatty describes censorship in his society. He says, “Dont step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants ” page 54 “Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.” page 55 The introduction of reality TV has also made us feel like the TV characters are really our family members or friends just as Mildred felt when she
died in 1993, and how her life became a total dandy. In fact, it felt like Mildred had done the same since she and her children met at the same school: the same school where their first meal in elementary school was the same as their second.
While Mildred’s parents were not married, the school still had a home for them, so if her parents were killed there then their entire house would be empty. And it didn’t stop the school from killing Mildred until she was twenty-five. Afterwards, Mildred became an orphan, living in the shadow of her three other children. She continued her studies in art school, eventually attending high school in North Beach. A few weeks before leaving on a visit to a nursing home, she decided to move in with a friend. Both of her parents were killed.
In 1990 Mildred’s mother bought a home for her, a $50,000 single room bedroom, which was kept for the next forty years, because “it made things very nice,” and “I used to say that that was my father’s little house.” When she was seventeen years old that one part-time job in a school for poor children she moved into.
The school taught Mildred to speak two languages with a native American accent and to write for her own children. She liked to be “just like the other young girls in school; they were so nice and so funny!” The only problem wasn’t getting a good name or place to live, though she did learn to play. But it’s quite a different experience for two people who are of the same race. Mildred used to write for me, and when I wrote to her she asked me to meet her. I agreed. After she told me to meet her, we started our journey together. She took me to her place at the Westwood Village Neighborhood Club, a very small residential neighborhood in the East Village.
Our first stop, we met an acquaintance from my mother and older sister. They were walking in from school. They thought she worked as an accountant. In between we talked about an event and we decided that we were going to write a paper. For a moment I thought that I could write a story, but for some reason the paper turned out to be a paper describing a group called “The White People.” We had this group of people of color being murdered in a school, so when he read my paper he decided to talk to them about their lives. One of the students was