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Banning Book Fahrenheit 451

Decent Essays

It’s quite an unwonted feeling to read a book about a place where books are prohibited and frowned upon; knowing that at any second, the book can be ripped from your hands—burnt at precisely four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit. This place is the future. Guy Montag is a fireman whose duty is to burn books. He lives in a place in time (the 90s) where the government has made it illegal to read, or even possess, books in order to keep their citizens “happy.” Guy meets a teenage girl, Clarisse McClellan, and her positive personality completely changes the way Montag looks at life, with one question—“Are you happy?” For the first time in his life, Guy Montag realized that he was not. Ray Bradbury wrote this well-known classic, “Fahrenheit 451” in the 1950s, portraying a world where books would eventually die out and be replaced with television in order for everyone to remain positive and good-natured. Nevertheless, the theme of this novel is the absence of books and how it negatively affects everyone. Bradbury puts emphasis on “unhappiness” and the cause of it being literature—hence the banning of books. …show more content…

“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.” (pg. 58) “The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.” (pg.

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