Focus on author, Characters, themes, important knowledge

Fahrenheit 451By: Ray Bradbury

Essential Questions

• What are the potential dangers of technological advancement?• What are the potential dangers of censorship? Can we censor OURSELVES? How? Do others censor us?• Is modern America becoming more like the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451?

Ray Bradbury• Born in Waukegan, Illinois on

August 22, 1920 and died on June 5, 2012 in L.A.

• Started writing at the age of 11• Graduated from a Los Angeles

High School and continued his education by studying on his own at the library and continued to write.

• His book The Martain Chronicles (1950) established his reputation as a leading American writer of science fiction.

• F.451 was published in 1953 and became Bradbury’s most popular and widely read work.

• He wrote F. 451 in the basement of the UCLA Library on a type-writer for $.10 a half hour.

• 1. Type of Work: Novel• 2. Genre: Science Fiction• 3. Time and Place Written: 1950-1953 in L.A.,

California• 4. Published: First as The Fireman in 1951

then as Fahrenheit 451 in 1953• 5. Protagonist: Guy Montag• 6. Antagonist: Captain Beatty and Society• 7. Setting (Time): Sometime in the 21st

Century (2 atomic wars since 1990)• 8. Setting (Place): an unnamed city• 9. Themes: Censorship and Knowledge vs.

Ignorance• 10. Symbols: fire, the hearth, the

salamander, the phoenix

Key facts

Characters• Guy Montag: A third-generation fireman who

suddenly realizes the emptiness of his life and starts to search for meaning in the books he is supposed to be burning.

• Captain Beatty: The captain of Montag’s fire department. He is cunning and devious, and so perceptive that he appears to read Montag’s thoughts.

• Clarisse McClellan: A beautiful seventeen-year-old who introduces Montag to the world’s potential for beauty and meaning with her gentle innocence and curiosity.

Characters• Professor Faber: A retired English professor

whom Montag encountered a year before the book opens. Faber still possesses a few precious books and aches to have more.

• Granger: The leader of the “Book People;” Granger is intelligent, patient, and confident in the strength of the human spirit.

• Mildred Montag: Montag’s brittle, sickly looking wife. She is obsessed with watching television and refuses to engage in conversation with her husband about their marriage or her feelings.

themes• Censorship- the prevention of

disturbing or painful thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness except in a disguised form.– 1. Why books are banned in the story of the

novel: there are 2 factors=• 1. Books lead to general lack of interest in

reading.• 2. Make people actively hostile toward books.

Censorship• 1. The first factors include the popularity of

competing forms of entertainment, such as TV and radio.

» Bradbury thinks that the presence of fast cars, loud music, and advertisements creates a lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has the time to concentrate.

» The huge mass of published material is too overwhelming to think about which leads to a society that reads condensed books (popular in Bradbury’s time) rather than the real thing.

Censorship•2. The second factor involves envy.

» People don’t like to feel inferior to those who have read more then they have.» The novel suggests the most important

factor leading to censorship is the objections of special-interest groups and “minorities” to things in books that offends them.

***Bradbury is extremely sensitive to any attempts to restrict his free speech.***

Themes• 2. Knowledge vs. Ignorance: –Guy Montag’s duty is to

destroy knowledge and promote ignorance in order to create sameness among the population.

• So….why did Ray Bradbury write a book about the burning of books anyway? – Book burning is the practice of ceremoniously

destroying by fire one or more copies of a book or other written material. In modern times other forms of media, such as gramophone records, CDs and video tapes have also been ceremoniously burned or torched.

– The practice, often carried out publicly, is usually motivated by moral, political or religious objections to the material.

The Burning Question

• Burning books is often associated with the Nazi regime. On May 10, 1933, Nazis in Berlin burned works of Jewish authors, and other "degenerate" books as well as other works considered "un-German" the 1930s and 1940s.

Not Just the Nazi’s-

• Christian books were burnt by a decree of emperor Diocletian in 303, calling for an increased persecution of Christians.

• In 1410 John Wycliffe's books were burnt by the illiterate Prague archbishop Zbyněk Zajic z Házmburka to hinder the spread of Jan Hus' teaching.

• Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible was burned in Germany in 1624 by order of the Pope.

Notable IncidentsOn the following slides, are historical incidents in which

books were burned for the reasons stated on the previous slide.

• In 1497 the Bonfire of the Vanities, preached by Girolamo Savonarola, consumed pornography, lewd pictures, pagan books, gaming tables, cosmetics, copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, and all the works of Ovid which could be found in Florence.

• In 1842, officials at the school for the blind in Paris France, were ordered by its new director to burn books written in the new braille code. After every braille book at the institute that could be found was burned, supporters of the code's inventor, Louis Braille, rebelled by continuing to use the code, and braille was eventually restored at the school.

Notable Incidents

• In 1917 in Russia the Bolsheviks ordered the destructions of all books contrary to Communism, including many religious works, works in favor of the Czarist history, works on nationalism, works on freedom and economic profit.

• In 1948, in Binghamton, New York children - overseen by priests, teachers, and parents - publicly burned around 2000 comic books.

Notable Incidents

• In May 1981 Sinhalese police officers on a rampage burned the public library of Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka.– A huge library collection, which was the second

largest library in Asia, was destroyed: 97,000 books.– And a very rare collection of ancient palm leaf

volumes were among them.• In 1992 the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo was

attacked by Serb nationalist forces and the whole collection was burned.– The largest single act of book-burning in modern

history.

Notable Incidents

In the 1990s, congregants of the Full Gospel Assembly in Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada burned books with ideas in them that they did not agree with, or that they deemed to contain ideas contrary to the teachings of God.

There have been several incidents of Harry Potter books being burned, including those directed by churches at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Charleston, South Carolina, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Notable Incidents

• Ray Bradbury implies that the Nazi book burnings drove him to write the short story The Fireman:– "It follows then that when Hitler burned a book I

felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one in the same flesh."

Why Study this book?

• Read the following quote from Bradbury—then discuss with the people around you if you agree or not? Why? Discuss your own experiences and opinions about reading, censorship, and the fear of books.

– “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not

reading them.”

What do YOU Think?

• At the bottom of your notes, summarize what you have learned about the author, the novel, history of book burning, and themes associated with the book.

Summary