F451 - Themes

The major theme within Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury would be censorship.  Censorship is a very harmful thing to the human mind and occurs everyday.  In this society, within Fahrenheit 451, the firemen are not men who come rescue you.  These men come to burn your books and anything that stands in the way of them.  It does not matter if your house gets in the way or you are in the way either. When the books burn, everything around it will too.  It surprised me when Guy burned someone's house down.  With that act, you can see where the characters and people of that society are within their minds.  They follow the government.  Except Guy who does rebel, for he is the only courageous one we really see, in all honestly.  Because of censorship, these books are burned.  All literature is turned into ash.  People have no deep thought processes behind emotions, thoughts, and actions.  They simply have no explanations for anything because ethey never experienced thing.  They never read about responses or analyzed behavior within stories.  This to me is a sad life.  This makes me feel sorrow for the characters because they do not know any better to protect themselves.  They are like hopeless, helpless little children. This makes me feel sorrow for the future because every day we are leaning more and more towards censorship.  I find it sad that not everyone can except others for their differences.  It makes me unhappy.  But if humans are censored too much, they will not see these differences clearly and as the government thinks, will be peace.  I do not think that will happen anytime soon.  If anything happened to this magnitude it would take years upon years.

"Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non-fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost. (Bradbury 107)"  To live in a society where people think and see this, would be a shame on the human mind.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Print.