By Tyler Bell

The smell of fire fills the air as smoke blocks out the street lights. For the fireman “it was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.” Books burn on the street corner as many come out to watch the scene for their evening entertainment. The number 451 is illuminated by the burning books. This is the world of Fahrenheit 451 as envisioned by Ray Bradbury in 1953. 

While living through the Trump presidency, groupthink and the inability to think for oneself, along with the idea of censorship have entered into many of my daily conversations. Questions like, “Are people we disagree with being censored online?” or “How do we break the mold of thinking only in terms of party lines?” have become commonplace in my own life and our national conversations. This led me to become curious about censorship and groupthink, so I quickly looked for literary works that really fleshed out the risks or benefits of it. It was only natural that I stumbled across the classic, Fahrenheit 451.

Fahrenheit 451 takes place in 2015 in a world where books are illegal and most entertainment is nothing more than drivel. Easy plots and short phrases, nothing too complex in thought, lest you become upset by its complexities. The story begins with a book burning as our main character, Guy Montag, is introduced to us, taking pleasure in his job. As a fireman it is his job to respond to reports of books and burn them to ash. He returns to the fire house and gleefully puts his gear away, whistling while he hangs up his jacket, dotted with ash, and heads home. However, this night is different from the rest. On this night he will meet the most dangerous person in the world, someone who asks too many questions. 

Clarisse McClellan is the match that lights the fire within Guy, and as she questions much about him, he in turn begins to question much about himself and his life. She dies after only a few days in a car accident but her impression on Guy is lasting. The events that unfold after their first meeting and her eventual departure follow Guy Montag wrestling with the idea that maybe the books he has been burning for 20 years are actually good and the society in which he lives has poisoned its people. Now, this realization is slow and a constant battle unfolds between his chief fireman, Beatty, who tells Guy how books came to be banned and why we are all better off without them, and a man he meets by the name of Faber, whose love for books sparks interest within Guy, leading to Faber helping Montag as he tries to figure out what side he believes in. 

Ultimately Montag is caught with books by Beatty and forced to burn not only the books but also his house. Instead of doing this he decided to kill Beatty and try to flee the city. A chase ensues and, as the whole city watches with anticipation, Guy Montag gets away into the safety of the forest, where he meets a group of book lovers who have also fled the city so that they may preserve what little is left of books. As these gentlemen tell Guy of their responsibility to preserve the book, bombs fall over the city killing everyone, burning down the old civilization, making room for a new one to take its place.

Now this is only a rough summary of the whole but the many parts of this book are what really expand on the problem of Guy’s struggle to figure out how to think for himself and the interactions between Guy and Beatty and Guy and Faber give depth to Ray Bradbury’s criticism of society’s tendency to self-censor and the struggle of making your own decisions. 

Throughout Guy’s story Beatty is set to be a devious conniving man who only wants to maintain the current status quo and burn burn burn that presky free thought away. This is most clear through most interactions between Guy and Beatty, but what does that make Faber? The hero? The man who helps save Guy by making him a free thinker, or is Faber another individual using Guy to further a personal agenda? The passage below is a dialogue between Faber and Guy through the two-way-radio Faber had designed for Guy, allowing Guy to pursue the truth while Faber safely hid from reality in his house full of books. The money Guy refers to is money that Faber asked for so that they can print more copies of the Bible that Guy has stolen from a house he burned down earlier in the book. Guy didn’t come up with this idea, nor does he truly understand why he is doing all this. The scene addresses the idea of following on faith, following without question or thought–the exact thing that Guy is attempting to break throughout this book.

“Ten million men mobilized,” Faber’s voice whispered in his other ear. “But say one million. It’s happier.” 

“Faber?” 

“Yes?”

 “I’m not thinking. I’m just doing like I’m told, like always. You said get the money and I got it. I didn’t really think of it myself. When do I start working things out on my own?”

 “You’ve started already, by saying what you just said. You’ll have to take me on faith.”

 “I took the others on faith! “

 “Yes, and look where we’re headed. You’ll have to travel blind for a while. Here’s my arm to hold on to.”

 “I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.”

Guy at this point has already learned of the terrible reality of why books became banned, how we did it to ourselves well before there was any law about books being illegal. Yet he still was unsure about how to feel about all of it–the pleasure and power he saw in books but also the damage and discomfort books brought. Guy begins to feel that the world around him had trapped people within it and maybe books could break the chains of this meaningless existence, but in his frustration with people he witnesses the “danger” of books. In an earlier passage one of his wife’s friends cries because he reads from a book, bringing back painful memories of her former husband. A simple poem brought pain into a world where people only know dull happiness. Even though throughout this reckless act Faber was in his ear, Guy was still unsure if the power books held were worth the risks, the pain, the change from the only world he ever knew, frozen by his inability to choose. 

This conversation between Faber and Guy is the most forward admission of deep confusion by Guy. He fears that all he does is follow what others tell him, that he never makes a decision, never asks questions, never chooses for himself. In this passage it is still unclear if Guy is making decisions for himself or if he is buying into this new dogma pushed by Faber.  This passage serves as a reminder that each side, whether good or evil, will try to manipulate individuals, if it can benefit them. 

Ray Bradbury’s choice to have this story told from a third person point of view is only part of the narration puzzle. We constantly see how Guy Montag does not have all the information, and so is heavily dependent on others to draw conclusions. Faber introduces him to the underground world of books but we only ever see this world through what Faber tells Montag, until Guy Montag has to flee the city. The audience’s understanding of both the new world of books and the old world and how we got to where we are now starts at the same level as Guy Montag. We are with Guy through all the revelations and trying moments but we are only with Guy. We know only the information Guy has been given. This choice by Bradbury makes it so that the audience is Guy Montag. We take on his perspective. We may be able to look at him, surrounded by a library of books, reading about him in a book and think, “Take the books Guy! Take the books and run!” but the book’s narration forces us to be in that fire station with Guy as Beatty shows you the stupidity of literature, while Faber comforts Guy. Passages where Guy wrestles with his own independence in thought are made more compelling because we only know what Guy is thinking. And at the end of the book I can’t blame Guy Montag for staying with the homeless book keepers in the woods. 

At the beginning of this post I reflected on why this book caught my eye and now I know why it has left such an impact. I am writing this in September of an election year, in the middle of a pandemic, with wildfires raging in my home state and protests all across the nation. This book was a story of internal struggle to gain self control in a world where we are given so much false information that it becomes hard to make the right choice a choice at all. To listen to the media is to listen to Faber and Beatty–people attempting to persuade you with stories and information that you don’t know is true until you ask questions and seek out answers for yourself. Not until you think for yourself.