The Light and Heat of Ideas: Fahrenheit 451 Review

Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel Fahrenheit 451 is one of those classics it seems everyone read in high school, but it somehow missed my alma mater’s curriculum, so I had the joy of reading it for the first time recently. It is a shame that I didn’t read it in high school since this novel would have engrossed me. If I were to teach high school English or college literature, I would require this novel as the first book students read as it serves as a wondrous appreciation of the printed word, education, and the ideas that shape our world. Bradbury reminds his readers that ideas and thoughtful art challenge our assumptions, spark our imagination, and help us grow as people and as a world.

If you don’t know the story, the authorities of the United States in Bradbury’s future are afraid of an educated and thinking public. They have banned reading and inculcate the populace with television screens that take up entire walls and broadcast the most inane programming imaginable. Guy Montag works for the government as a fire fighter, but as we learn quickly, firemen in this future start fires, they don’t extinguish them. They are called out when it is discovered that someone owns books. Montag loves his work, but he has been secretly lifting a book from the fire scenes now and again. He meets a teenager Clarisse, whose precociousness, depth, and wisdom surprise him. She sets him on a path that leads to him repudiating his way of life. Along the way Montag meets Faber, a former professor who describes in sumptuous language the honor and wonder of reading. Faber may not be a Christian, but he loves the Bible because it is full of real ideas from real people wrestling with their world. He loves that books make us think rather than supply our thoughts for us as do the television screens. But this tutelage cannot last in innocence and a fantastic chase sequence emerges. Montag finds his way to a band of nomadic scholars who have taken it upon themselves to memorize books. Their identities have become those books; they are subsumed into the world of ideas created therein. When the final apocalyptic war breaks out, these scholars understand that they have within themselves the memory, the blueprint of civilization in their brains. The ending of Fahrenheit 451 almost feels like the setup to Walter M. Miller’s post-apocalyptic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Bradbury is one of our most prolific authors who has traversed across several genres. Fahrenheit 451 reads like a story about an idea — the characters themselves are not people we latch onto too tightly. But that is not a knock against the tale, because Bradbury has supplied us with a harrowing picture of a future that seems at times a bit too similar to our present. Montag’s fire captain, Beatty, tells him,

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Fahrenheit 451 is the type of literature that makes me want to pick up a book and simply smell it, to bask in its presence. Reading itself can be an act of growth and revolution. It makes us engage ideas and worlds we may have never before considered. Reading truly is a work of magic. As I read Fahrenheit 451, I was reminded of Lauren Winner’s excellent essay “In Defense of Pleasure Reading,” in which she writes:

Novels are not just fun and escapist. They are also tools for shaping our moral selves. They have, in the words of ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, “the power to elicit our sympathy and thus change our attitudes.” Novels remind us that life is structured like story and not like a math equation, a theory, or a textbook.