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Examples Of Allusions In Fahrenheit 451

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Set in a near distant future, Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of protagonist, Guy Montag who lives in a world where firemen start fires rather than putting them out and people do not read books, enjoy nature, think independently, or have meaningful conversations (“Plot Overview”). Instead, they drive excessively fast, watch needless amounts of television on wall-size sets, and listen to the radio through “seashell” attached to their ears. Unfulfilled by his occupation and discontent with a society unconcerned with reports of an impending atomic war, Montag begins to question the ways of the world (“Fahrenheit 451 Summary”). When he is punished by his boss, the local fire chief, for harboring books, Montag turns a flamethrower on his superior …show more content…

The idea of the cyclical rebirth of a more intelligent, individualized nation, expressed by Author Ray Bradbury’s use of allusions, is the most intriguing aspect of the novel. While writing excellent social criticism, Bradbury uses several direct quotations from works of literature, including the Bible, and a further analysis of the patterning of these allusions shows their function of adding subtle depth to the ideas of the novel. The literary allusions are used to underscore the emptiness of the twenty-fourth century in which the book is set, and the Biblical allusions point subtly toward a solution to help us out of our intellectual "Dark Age” (Yorke). Bradbury’s use of allusions seems to be directed to the fact that the nature of life is cyclical and when the book was written, the world was at the bottom of an intellectual cycle. He says that we must have hope for an upward swing of the circle, but now in the twenty-first century, we can see that we are either at the bottom of the circle again, or that we never reached the top. This concept is shown best through the character of Granger. “And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know, and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again” (Bradbury 153). The major metaphor in the novel, which supports the idea of the natural cycle, is the allusion to the Phoenix, the mythical bird of ancient Egypt that periodically burned itself to death and resurrected from its own ashes to a restored youth (Yorke). Again using the character of Granger, Bradbury expresses the hope that mankind might use its intellect and his knowledge to end the constant cycles of disintegration and rebirth. It is crucial that, in

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