Fahrenheit 451 {Back to the Classics Challenge 2016}

Finally, the fourth month of the year and I've finished my second Back to the Basics Challenge book. [Click the above image to go to the originating website.] I kept picking this one up, every month, but just could not get into the story. This day was different. I started reading it late morning, and while juggling the daily tasks, finished it just after dinner.

***This post MAY contain SPOILERS so if you've not read the book or don't want any inside information about what happens {but really, who doesn't know the basis of this book?}, stop now.***

It was exactly what I'd expected it to be. It is rushed and harsh. I was very relieved that it was not as intense as Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World. I would not have been able to handle it if it was.

I thought I chose this as the book that'd been banned. There are very adult themes (right at the start, someone pretty much had overdosed; the whole premise of the book is a bleak outlook of the future [with glimmers here and there of hope]) but I don't see why it was banned. 

Well, I really do and perhaps am just choosing to skip over the references to the offended minorities that make the future despicable. Even just the insinuation of 'minorities' causing problems with the fabric of our society is touchy. But it doesn't really matter because instead this is my 20th Century Classic pick. 

I'm going to quote a portion from the "Coda" (p. 178)

"For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make and unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my lawbreakers sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall."

All that to say, he knew his book would be controversial. This was originally published in 1953 and the way people behave in the book is indicative of that. But it could have just as well been written now, with a few adjustments of the kinds of entertainment and news. 

When I read futuristic books that describe living in a world that is caught up in simply being 'happy' or satisfying their base desires, I'm reminded of Amusing Ourselves to Death. I can't help it. When Beatty [the Fireman Captain] was describing the progression of books and reading, news stories to digest-digests, etc., I was thinking of chapter 4 (and chapters when he breaks down the progress from newspapers to the telegraph to television- take that further to Twitter nowadays!):

Right to the end of the 19th century ads still were considered to be serious and to convey information. This was fairly shattered (Postman's word) in the 1890s with the inclusion of illustrations and images, and the adoption of slogans. By the beginning of the 20th century poetential customers were no longer assumed rational. "Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. Reason had to move itself to other arenas" (pg. 60). [from my blog post]

"Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes it is the other way around...[As] typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines. (from chapter 1, p. 29)"

Okay, I will go back to the book at hand, Fahrenheit 451, and stop digressing to other books. The writing really isn't that great. I do think my favorite portions are Clarisse and Montag dialoguing and Beatty's speeches. I really don't know if all copies have an Afterword by the author but my copy does. In it he talks about his remaking of this book to be a play, in which he discloses Beatty really has a huge library himself! 

The entire time I was 'listening' to Beatty, I was convinced he himself had books- and read them too. Of course we aren't given that information in the original story itself but that Afterword convinced me that Beatty did have books. He quoted much too much of the great authors to not have books. 

Another interesting bit is that Montag comes to the conclusion, and I think he is given reinforcement by Faber, that Beatty wanted to die and that's why he pushed Montag so much. I didn't really think this at first but while reading the reasoning that Montag and Faber use, I guess it sounds reasonable. But at the same time, it could simply have been Montag's way of 'reasoning' out that his killing Beatty was unavoidable and actually a favor to the man. 

"Reasoning is good for logically demonstrating mathematical truth, but unreliable when judging ideas because our reasoning will justify all kinds of erroneous ideas if we really want to believe them." (L. N. Laurio, Charlotte Mason's Principle #18)

And Clarisse? She was just much too sweet and innocent not to like. I *knew* that Bradbury would finish her off in one way or another. She was too carefree [in a very different way than the other characters where care free meant you didn't think about anything worth caring about] and took time to look at and examine things and people. She wanted to know. 

Thinking more about what is similar today to the book: What about that 'dog'? Is this what people think drones are? Just a thought.