Fahrenheit 451

It is time once again for another entry in my year-long experiment in living (actually reading) fiction. In the interest of keeping these intros short, I’ll recap that my literary travails this year have encompassed everything from mystery to science fiction, and I have pulled major lessons about writing from each work. The last novel of this first round was no exception: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, one of the best-known examples of dystopian science fiction, which is becoming one of my favorite genres. I know I said similar things about Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but once again I was completely blown away by this work and consider it possibly the finest piece of fiction I’ve read in my short life. Bradbury’s use of language to describe this futuristic, ignorant world is fraught with incredible prescience. Each sentence is crafted tautly and conveys miles beyond just what the words say. Overall I would say this encompasses the two major lessons I learned from the reading of this masterpiece:

1. Writing a book about books. It seems simplistic, but this is the only example of this type of writing that I’ve come across to date. Beyond all the other themes of this book, Bradbury was most concerned with the passing on of information. This novel is a celebration of the written word, and Bradbury takes great pains in the characters’ dialogue to describe what has happened to society to make the concept of learning almost obsolete. Nowhere else is this better understood than in the characters we meet at the end of the book: a group of over-educated (for this universe) men who have taken to memorizing books, rather than daring to have the physical things around to be burned by the firemen. Conversely this is also implemented well by the main antagonist, Captain Beatty, who delivers long diatribes against books but ultimately begs to be killed by the main character, possibly because of what he knows he has done to his world.
2. Using a novel to tell truths about society. This is a more general theme that I have discussed, especially concerning The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I wanted to return to it here as this is where the book became even more impactful for me. Recall that Bradbury wrote this book, which features flat-screen televisions, in-ear headphones and a vicious electronic animal-type device that hunts down its prey, in the early Fifties. Not only was he railing against the dumbing down of the McCarthyites, but also predicting where our society was heading as things like television were one-tenth the size of those that appear in the novel. Bradbury was spot-on in seeing how other forms of 20th century media would begin to crowd out literary works, and deftly uses this as an allegory of the importance of reading to gain knowledge. This book is the best example I have come across of using this genre to speculate about where our species is heading, and has become an eerily prescient guide to our current age.

There are plenty of other lessons to draw upon from this novel, but I’m guessing many of you have read this one and seen your own parallels to our world. If not, I can’t recommend this book highly enough as it has affected me tremendously, and in ways I’m still figuring out. Plus it is a great example of how to pack the sentences of a fairly short book with meaning - each one entails much more than the sum of its words, making this a book worth paying deep attention to each time you read it.

Well, that’s it for the first round of fiction in this experiment. Up next is a book on writing itself: Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. I’ll write an essay on that and also present the list of books that will encompass the second half of my year. Stay tuned for more updates on my year of living (actually reading) fictionally!