Context: Bringing it together…

• Remember: Children of Men • Revise: Fahrenheit 451 • Have other examples to draw upon:

– E.g. 1984 (Chapter 1) – E.g. August 2026 – There will come soft rains

• Future Setting: Written in 1953, the story is set in an unspecified city and year. Books are banned. Society has become anti-intellectual, disconnected and focussed entirely on self-gratification.

• Protagonist: Guy Montag (a Fireman. His job is to burn books).

• Antagonist: Captain Beatty.

• Other Important Characters: – Clarise McClellan (teenage girl and

his new neighbor, challenges Montag’s view of happiness)

– Mildred (Montag’s wife, spends her days engrossed in the three full walls of TV).

– Professor Faber (former English professor who helps Montag, provides information. Professor Granger takes this role later.)

• Key Themes: – Censorship – Conformity v Individuality – Influence of Mass Media – Happiness – The power of thought and ideas

Useful Examples • The Blood Purifying Machine.

Technology is able to heal physical wounds, but it cannot make a broken psyche healthy again. While it can fix the physical effects of Mildred’s suicide attempt, it does not fix the psychological reasons which caused it.

• “Did it drink of the darkness? Did is suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years?” 23

• “Someone else’s blood there. If only someone else’s flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry-cleaner’s and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it…” 25

Useful Examples • Censorship. Books have been banned; any which are found are burnt.

Imagery of burning books is reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Restriction of ideas is a strong totalitarian theme.

• “None of these books agree with each other…The people in these books never lived.” 52

• “More sports for everyone…More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience.” 75

• “It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick.” 77

• “People want to be happy…Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation?” 78

• “You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed…” 79 • “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a

question to worry him; give him one. Better yet. Give him none.” 80 • “The whole culture’s shot through...he public stopped reading of it’s own

accord.” 113

Useful Examples • The Parlour Walls and The Family.

Through Mildred we see the effect of the lack of “texture” which Faber talks about. They are a distraction, with Mildred not even able to recall the names of the characters in her televised “family”.

• “…you can’t argue with the four-fall televisor…It tells you what to think and blasts it in…” 109

• “…the great idiot monsters…” 151

Useful Examples • The Lost Youth. Young people are

violent, unthinking, impulsive and dangerous. They fight, go racing in jet-cars, and many die. Montag himself is almost run down by a joyrider for ‘fun’.

• Their lives have lost structure, support and purpose. The family unit is meaningless, as people no longer (or are unable to) form lasting bonds.

• Clarisse is used as a contrast to these people.

• “…everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another…people hurt each other nowadays…They kill each other.” 42

Useful Examples • The Nuclear War. The story ends with Montag’s home city (and, it is implied,

much of America), bombed with nuclear weapons. • This conflict has been building in the background of the story, but people, too

unthinking beyond their immediate sources of transient pleasure and ignorant of their world, have ignored it.

• This is the final, extreme representation of the self-destructive nature of this society. Divorced from any sense of meaningful purpose and achievement, it’s focus on the superficial has led to its destruction.

• Linked strongly to fears from the 1950s: the Cold War and US/USSR Rivalried, Mutually Assured Destruction, etc.

• “How in hell did those bombers get up there every second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it?...Is it because we’re having so much fin at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are?...the world works hard and we play…” 96

• “Let the war turn off the “families”. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.” 115

• “The war began and ended in an instant.” 202

Useful Examples • Thought and Ideas. Books are symbolic of thought and free ideas. • “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the

patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” 108 • “Three things are missing. Number one…quality…To me it

means texture…It has features. This book can go under the microscope…Good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies…

• Leisure…time to think…if you’re not driving a hundred miles and 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-fall televisor…It tells you what to think and blasts it in…

• Number one…quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.” 108-110

Useful Examples • Thought and Ideas (continued). Society cannot live, grow or

survive if people lack free thought, which is central to the concept of humanity. This is a society without progress, without growth: which exists, but where people have no purpose. There is only distraction, but no future.

• “We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam…somehow we think we can grow, feeding of flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.” 108

• “We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the gaddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them…even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them…We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run…” 209

• Future Setting: Written in 1948, it is set in a futuristic London in the year 1984. London is in Oceania, one of three eternally warring superpowers (the other being Eurasia and Eastasia).

• Protagonist: Winston Smith (party employee and worker at the Ministry of Truth)

• Antagonists: Totalitarian government (INGSOC), led by the (potentially fictional) Big Brother.

• “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”

• “In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.”

• “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made…would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment…. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

• “WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”

• “The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order.”

• “Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

• The government controls people through controlling information. History is manipulated. Language itself is changed. Media is used to spread propaganda, incite hatred, etc.

• A world built upon surveillance, loss of privacy and, with it, the loss of free will.

• Controlling thoughts, not just actions. • This is a world that is already LOST. There is

no hope to redeem it. It is a warning of where totalitarianism leads.

• Heavily based upon Orwell’s world: imagery and world is based on the totalitarian regimes of Stalin (Communist Russia) and Hitler (Nazi Germany).

Useful Examples • Telescreens: technology used invasively for

surveillance purposes. • Thought Police and Thoughtcrime: Not

only actions, but thoughts and holding ideas is punishable. The Though Police is the terrifying embodiment of the ultimate oppression of human identity.

• Newspeak: Ideas controlled through language (or, more specifically, reducing language). A repressive society enforced and manipulated from above (as opposed to the public itself, as in Fahrenheit 451)

• “The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

• The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

• The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.”

• “Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.”

• “A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch. … • The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at

last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here. …

• The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

• Two o'clock, sang a voice. • Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice

hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

• Two-fifteen. • The dog was gone. • In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl

of sparks leaped up the chimney.”

• “The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.”

• The routine of everyday life is made strange by the absence of the humans that the house was built to serve.

• Bradbury shows how artificial and mechanical life can be, especially in an age where technology dictates so much of what we do and how we do it.

• The house stands as a testament to the arrogance that comes with technology outstripping the more humane concerns of culture, and the destruction of the house is a kind of rough justice done to a world that values machines more than people.

• Technology cannot be equated with humanity.

Common Ideas: • Technology cannot be trusted to save

humanity; overreliance on technology degrades humanity.

• The importance of humanity, individuality and progress, and how these things should not be taken for granted.

• The dangers of war and conflict. • All stories are reactions to the fears, ideas and

concerns of the present-day/contemporary worlds in which they were written.

• If the future is to have meaning, we cannot forget our humanity.