One of the few resistant young people, a girl named Clarisse, sums up society as follows: "People don't talk about anything…nobody says anything different from anyone else" (31). Most individuals are so drugged into believing that momentary pleasures are all that matter, they cannot feel compassion any more: "Time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles per hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four wall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!" (84).
The surveillance of the society in Fahrenheit 451 is complete: Guy's boss, Captain Beatty, knows that Guy is hoarding books. He sees the books as an exhibition of a fireman's morbid curiosity about what he destroys, almost like a policeman's desire to take confiscated drugs. "Where's your common sense? None of these books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in these books never lived. Come on now!" (38). Unity in thought, as conveyed by television or the government is what matters, not debate, dissent, or even rationality. Man's intellect may have produced technology,...
At first, portions of books were banned, then more and more of old books were eradicated, eventually to the point that it was easier not to have them. However this 'easiness' has created a citizenry so complacent that they hardly care that their nation is facing war. The world ends with a conflagration, a man-made holocaust that embodies the folly of viewing technology as forwarding the rest of humankind. The destruction of books through man-made fire results in the destruction of the world through man-made fire.
Both good and bad people die in the book -- all through fire. Clarisse, who can appreciate nature despite the coldness and ruthlessness of her society, is killed by a racing car. Mrs. Hudson dies with her books. Yet the end vision of the book is cautiously optimistic -- because the use of warfare is so destructive, it eventually destroys the technological mechanisms of control, and forces individuals back into a purer and more elemental way of life. Like the phoenix, independent thought will rise again: like a natural forest fire that kills everything in its wake, eventually a newer and purer vision of humanity will emerge.
Work Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.
