Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Reviewed by Nathan B.
The book Fahrenheit 451 shows how the main character’s life changes during a relatively short time span. The main character, Guy Montag, is a firefighter in the future. However, in this future firefighters start fires instead of putting them out. These firefighters set fire to books because all books are banned. Montag meets a girl in his neighborhood, Clarisse, who gets him to question his entire life as a fireman through conversations about things that he has never thought of before. When he tries to bring these new conversations home, his wife is seemingly unresponsive as she mainly focuses on a television show that the entire population is absorbed with. In one conversation, Clarisse mentions how her generation (high schoolers of that time) is overly violent and careless, whether it be through purposely murdering peers or through driving at dangerously high speeds. In one of his missions, Guy is told to put kerosene on all of the books in a home but in an act of complete boldness, he manages to steal one of the books. Guy tries to understand the meaning of the book and how books and knowledge could make someone sacrifice their own life. Fahrenheit 451 continues on this path and takes some unexpected turns, making it a great read if you truly take the time to understand it.
In Fahrenheit 451, the author does an excellent job of writing a future that remains relevant in the present, as well as when it was written. He shows a future created by addiction and selfishness; he also shows the issue of spending our time isolated, slowly drifting away from greater knowledge in pursuit of entertainment. Bradbury creates a dystopian future where all books are illegal and everyone is absorbed by television. In this future people are so caught up in their own lives that they have forgotten how to get along with others, think for themselves, or understand the meaning behind anything they might have the chance to read. All of the characters in the book are much different than most people you would find today because of the way that these futuristic events affect them and how they interact with others. These characters are found to be ignorant and happy as they pretend that nothing is wrong and they are completely satisfied with their current lives. The author writes in a way that requires the reader to comprehend the text to advance in the book and with this comes further understanding of the text. The word choice used by the author is very extensive in contrast to the short length of the book, which is around 160 pages.
I feel as though this book displays advanced literature and because of this the target audience of Fahrenheit 451 is those with more literary experience. Factors such as the word choice and the extreme events that take place in the book further support that this book is aimed at an older group. It is a dystopian novel that shows how the world could go into chaos if we stopped having our own opinions. This book has quite a different style than most dystopian novels and is written by a well known, high quality author. If I were to give my own opinion on the book, I would give the book my recommendation. This book is very special in a way that makes you think during the course of reading it, while most other books you can just speed through. It is a very high quality book and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a book to read and has some time to think about what they are reading.