Name: Fahrenheit 451
Rating: 3.840735068912711 (2612 reviews)
ISBN: 9781400118182

Short Synopsis
Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed classic novel of censorship and defiance is as resonant today as it was when it was first published fifty years ago.

Full Synopsis
The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden.

Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires. And he enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs or the joy of watching pages consumed by flames, never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid. Then Guy met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think. And Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do.
--tantor.com

Fahrenheit 451

Danny White

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

里森

vivian mizuno

Elina Berzina

Photine

Caitlin

film → television → YouTube → TikTok

Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

Huiying 

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. 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.

It’ll be even more fun when we can afford to have the fourth wall installed.

‘Yes, I am!’ ‘It doesn’t show.’ ‘I am very much in love!’ He tried to conjure up a face to fit the words, but there was no face. ‘I am!’

‘Let’s talk about something else. Have you ever smelled old leaves? Don’t they smell like cinnamon? Here. Smell.’

We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out,”’ said Beatty. Stoneman glanced over at the Captain, as did Montag, startled. Beatty rubbed his chin. ‘A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555.’

Mild variations of this hardly seem absurd today.

Wasn’t there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner?

Ray Bradbury

Tim Pendry

'Fahrenheit 451' (1953) is deservedly a classic although a reading nearly three quarters of a century later cannot but see its flaws. Bradbury's determination on a polemic about the conditions of his time undermines its literary coherence and gives us an ending that has too much hysteria embedded. The book is one of several that the liberal intellectual community has sanctified as dystopian science fiction and which embody its anxieties about technological and populist modernity - Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' (1931/1932) and George Orwell's '1984' (1949) being the most obvious. In their reactions to their contemporary worlds, such novels are, in fact, deeply conservative while still belonging to the patrician progressive world that would inspire Harper Lee to deal with race relations as courtroom drama in 1960. Anxiety could then shift to 'hope' again. What is remarkable about the book is just how much of the future world (if you remove the more specific Cold War aspects of the case) chimes with our world. The material and social environment, allowing for caricature, is uncannily like ours in most respects other than book burning. Does it tell us much more than that liberal-minded intellectuals were becoming genuinely terrified of democratic totalitarianism in the age of the 'Red Scare'? Does it tell us that they actually had something to fear rather than that such a fear had to be expressed regardless of reality? When the book was written, it was reasonable to believe that radical anti-communist purges and enforcement of Cold War conformity might result in serious threats to liberal freedoms. Nuclear war was also a reasonable anxiety. The book reflects these concerns. In fact, the crisis blew over and nuclear war diminished as threat over time although never absolutely off the agenda. Intellectual fears were both genuine anxieties and proved to be exaggerated. The real threats were to come much later in the eventual collapse of regard for the intellectual. Liberal intellectuals can often be defined by their anxieties. Literature (or rather narrative as we move into a streamed world) is their way of expressing their anxieties. Their claim is that narrative reflects truth or at least some deeper 'inner' truth that 'writers' have access to. I am not so sure. Telling stories and telling truths about the world are different categories of experience just as religion and scientific enquiry are different categories of making sense of the world. We can judge a text separately on its narrative skill and on its meaningfulness then and now. In this case, Bradbury's narrative skill is undoubted, at least until his fireman (a burner of books) sets himself free, ends up with a peculiar community of book memorisers and watches the burning of the city he has left from a nuclear strike. This just gets silly in its aspirational liberalism. This idea of the world burning and having to be created anew was not uncommon in science fiction of the 1950s - Walter Miller's 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' (1959) might be regarded as its most complete expression - but it does seem over the top now and a parable for its time and not ours. Bradbury's solution to civilisational collapse (old intellectuals memorising texts) is a form of class self-love and a loss of nerve after a solid story that deserved something more than the wet dream of a liberal with no solution to the problem he had set himself of post-nuclear recovery. Indeed, this may be the central weakness of the book. 'Fahrenheit 451' is supposed to be about a culture in which knowledge is trivialised into non-existence, with book-burning making this process material and visceral. We are only two decades away from Hitler's 1933 PR stunt. By switching tack to the theme of civilisational destruction as a result of nuclear war, Bradbury makes that classic mistake of trying to sell two ideas and so not selling either fully. OK, so he sold the book as iconic but the meaning of both themes is weakened to the simplistic. This is a shame because Bradbury has integrity. He fairly puts the case for book burning articulately in the mouth of cynical realist Captain Beatty. Montag (the protagonist) resolves his situation on that occasion with violence not argument and against the pacific core liberal values of the author. Much of the rest of the book is about trying to get away from the problem that there are arguments for cultural trivialisation based on the depressive effects of intellectualism and that such arguments can perhaps only be resolved through power struggle, organisation and violence. Bradbury has to scuttle from Montag's gut position somehow because it threatens to turn liberalism into violent liberation that is too damn close to the expectations of Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy which would in turn justify the repression that Bradbury is trying to stand against. This leads us to his weak 'memory' solution and the attempt to make it meaningful through the pessimistic negativity of assuming it would work (which is unlikely) in the event of some inevitable nuclear war (intellectual pessimism proving itself to be highly depressive). The book thus becomes a classic because it raises its problem 'safely'. School teachers and liberals could satisfy themselves that just raising the problem in a free society and persuading through education would unravel the crisis. They were right ... but only up to a point and inauthentically. 'Fahrenheit 451' (like '1984' and 'Brave New World') are 'conservative' liberal polemics that represent 'warnings' based on radical extrapolations of things being seen to happen around the reader. They instil fear in order to offer coded corrections to trends that intellectuals have become anxious about. From this point on, such texts have to change thought and behaviour but to do so safely so that liberal values are not lost in excessive acceptance of what is after all only a story and not reality. No liberal writer actually wants people to do anything but only not to do some things. These books should be respected and judged as literature but we should be cautious about their meaning both in the world in which they were created where they acted as mythologising texts about contemporary reality and as retained iconic status. They simplify material and social complexity. As art, Bradbury offers us a classic with narrative flaws (derived from the drive towards an obvious polemic). As truth about the world, it is religion more than science, an expression of class anxiety that mythologises to persuade. It is of its time albeit with potential uses in ours. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the book is that the book burning is the bit that gets the attention but Bradbury equally explores another aspect of cultural politics that has been placed second by the book's iconisation - the political determination on happiness through entertainment. It is here that Bradbury has something important to say that is far more concerning than book burnings that never took place place and never were going to take place even under Edgar and Joe - that is, that being happy and thinking may require a political choice between them. Of course, some people are very happy thinking but any serious form of thinking will create questions. Questions eventually mean questions about our condition and that of society. 'Education' has, in our culture, ceased to educate along these lines except as ideological oppositionalism. Captain Beatty helps to articulate the essence of the problem. For most people, most of the time, the right to happiness, apparently guaranteed in the US Declaration of Independence, is extremely elusive. If happiness is such a right and the State can deliver it, who is to say that the job is not being done. This is not a simple case of right and wrong. The liberal intellectual has a class interest in associating thinking with happiness. The rest of humanity may not. The real issue in Fahrenheit 451 is the loss of having choice on which path to take. Bradbury is raising a question but avoiding its implications. The risk is that, in demanding free thought and adopting a moral position against mass media and the cult of happiness, the liberal intellectual might be arrogantly placing the majority in the oppressive position of having to be depressed and anxious in order to ensure a 'freedom' pleasurable to few. Of course, the ideal is the freedom to choose to be happy or thoughtful and this would be the liberal value worth preserving. Bradbury is noting here that politics is forcing a choice for the first at the expense of the second but an oppressive position would equally be to force the second. And there is another factor in the book that needs teasing out - the worship of texts and even of narrative itself when we have noted that texts (such as the Bible which plays a significant role in the book) and narrative cannot be assumed to be consonant with the truth of existence. Bradbury's assumption here is that the liberal canon - what would become Bloomism later - offers a superior status and understanding of the world. This is dubious even if the attitude appealed to generations of initially liberal but now conservative school teachers, professors and writers. What the canon offers (whether Don Quixote or Dosteoevsky) are arcane pleasures, class cohesion for the intelligensia in a culture, a contribution to social cohesion (now largely lost, a process which in itself is worth studying) and a way of training cadres in a liberal society. I read, therefore I rule. Much of liberal angst then and now is terror that a complex and networked system of cultural and so political rule - covering academia, publishing and media as much as governance, judiciary and executive powers - will be unravelled into barbarism or the mob by abandoning 'liberal values'. We can guess Bradbury would have been as horrified as any liberal intellectual by Trump and populism (as British equivalents are by Farage and Brexit) for this reason. The complexity of society requires simplification and the liberal requires it to be simplified in the direction of narrative. Narrative, of course, is complex and so necessarily exclusive of those not prepared to study according to its dictates but the idea of the superiority of narrative is the simple idea. Language is channelled into approved texts that offer 'ideas' with a history and the whole becomes 'culture'. 'Fahrenheit 451' thus becomes an interesting text about the importance of texts in a definition of civilisation that comes to be couched in radically hysterical and anxious terms in order to protect it from caricatured opponents whether presented as Big Brother or salamander trucks. In this context, it becomes vitally 'true' as cultural mythos because if there is one thing liberal civilisation understands it is that its version of civilisation (not the only one by any means) is extremely vulnerable to loss of narrative control. Narrative becomes the weapon that defends itself.

Jennifer

This is Black Mirror in book form before Black Mirror was a thing. Mostly corny, kinda brilliant, at least in parts. Very thought provoking especially in terms of the current argument that there is too much conflict and offense these days. What would happen if we eliminated conflicting thoughts or perspectives? What would happen if we censored anything that offended anyone? But I got bored with it. This was easy to put down. Although I can see how this might have inspired books like Ready Player One, I think the more contemporary books are better and this one was...corny. There’s no other word that describes how I feel about this. I get why it’s a classic. I understand the innovative ideas it ponders, but I still thought the plot was unexciting. Sue me.

Melissa Cometto

Da amante dei libri non capisco come io abbia potuto aspettare così tanto prima di leggere questo romanzo. E forse la risposta è semplice: certi libri arrivano quando devono arrivare. E questo è arrivato nel momento storico più giusto e più doloroso possibile. Fahrenheit 451 è un romanzo che parla di libri bruciati. Ma in realtà parla di qualcosa di molto più inquietante: parla di persone che smettono di voler pensare. In un mondo dove i pompieri non spengono incendi ma li appiccano per distruggere i libri, la cultura diventa pericolosa. La conoscenza è scomoda. La memoria è una minaccia. E mentre leggevo, non riuscivo a non pensare a quanto questo scenario non sia poi così lontano dalla nostra realtà. Viviamo in un’epoca in cui, in alcuni paesi, libri che hanno accompagnato la nostra crescita vengono censurati, modificati, banditi. E la domanda che mi martella è una sola: Come si può bandire la fantasia dalla vita di un bambino? La malizia non è nelle storie. È negli occhi di chi le vuole controllare. Chi vuole persone sedate davanti a uno schermo. Conformi. Consumatori. Ignari del passato. Perché un popolo che non legge è un popolo che non ricorda. E un popolo che non ricorda è più facile da governare. Bradbury non ha scritto solo una distopia. Ha scritto un avvertimento. Questo libro non è solo da leggere. È da difendere. Leggete. Vivete altre vite. Assorbite idee. Fatevi domande scomode. In Fahrenheit 451 il fuoco distrugge la carta. Nel nostro mondo, spesso, è l’indifferenza a fare il lavoro sporco. Non servono sempre pompieri con lanciafiamme. Basta convincere le persone che i libri siano inutili. Lenti. Superflui. Che sia meglio uno schermo che ti dice cosa pensare. Questo romanzo non mi ha dato speranza. Mi ha dato inquietudine. E forse è giusto così. Perché la ribellione non è romantica. È scomoda. È solitaria. È faticosa. E oggi, più che mai, leggere è un atto politico. La ribellione più grande, oggi, è ancora aprire un libro. E continuare a farlo. Non sono i libri a essere pericolosi. È chi li teme. E se un giorno non troveremo più storie sugli scaffali, non sarà perché le hanno bruciate. Sarà perché abbiamo smesso di difenderle. Il problema non è quando iniziano a bruciare i libri. Il problema è quando nessuno sente più l’odore del fumo.

This book is the perfect example of why we should all read. 

Theodore Wellman

Guy Mongag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires. And he enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames...never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid. Then Guy met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think. And Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do...
--back cover

Chase Leitner

Tim Robbins

Thought it was great, think abt censorship, which is definitely valuable at this time. Also the earphones and the walls made me self reflect a bit. Dystopian is an understatement, but interesting the weaponization of memory. Does a fish recognize the water it swims in? Super fire. 

Hugo Gebhard

A haunting cautionary tale told with beautiful language and philosophical depth. I knew the premise of the book before reading it, but I had no idea how dark and apocalyptic it truly is. 

 will stay with me for years to come, much like Ecclesiastes stayed with Guy Montag at the end of the novel.

Charlie Queen

A haunting cautionary tale told with beautiful language and philosophical depth. I knew the premise of the book before reading it, but I had no idea how dark and apocalyptic it truly is. Fahrenheit 451 will stay with me for years to come, much like Ecclesiastes stayed with Guy Montag at the end of the novel.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

a fiction book that tells nothing but the truth. a very important read for everyone 

angie

So much Deja Vu. The idea of happiness only allowed to exist and nothing negative is terrifying and gives fascism. I also don't like the idea of burning books because it represents the destruction of free thought and freedom of speech. Just the idea of a group of people rewriting books from memory is astounding. I feel like that's a game of "telephone" gone wrong.

Susan

Farenheit 451

The prose containing such beauty, the message barely containing an inferno.

Blake Dickson

The ending was throwing me Off... Anyways the rest of the book was good! Super interesting and timeless

Celina Irena Kuhn

I'm speechless. This is a book that everyone should read at least once in their life, to maybe see and understand what dangers are waiting for us with how our society is staring to work...

Martyna

10/10 pero ahora tengo que acostarme un rato en el suelo.

nieves

Maureen

** spoiler alert **
           “Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”

***

I was happy to read this book because I’ve been meaning to read it for the longest time. Thankfully, it was required reading for the class. The story heavily reminded me of 1984 because it deals with censorship. However, the events didn’t feel as grim because of Bradbury’s colloquial writing style. I felt pity for Montag’s marriage because I felt like he wanted to fix their relationship—however, Mildred was indifferent to his requests. It didn’t surprise me that she eventually betrayed him. Beatty was also a morally grey character. On the one hand, he was their leader, but he never attempted to conceal his widespread knowledge considering books. I believe he was a secret reader just like Montag— this explains why he didn’t do anything to prevent his death. Perhaps it was his way of atoning for his sins.

The plot was disjointed, though. I felt like I was watching everything go by so fast, even though plenty of major events were happening. Due to the lack of worldbuilding, the story failed to connect with me entirely. But overall, I still enjoyed the book because of its unique premise. Interesting how they only preserve the “classics” at the end. It’s bound to generate some discourse because what exactly counts as a classic?

Mira <3

people who called ray bradbury crazy are now rolling in their graves

This was to say, a very interesting book. The plot, characters, and the overall emotion the author was trying to convey were amazing. It made me want to read more. The author was amazing by building a visual by only words. I will definitely reread this book when I am older to understand it better. 

Guy Montag is a fireman. However, instead of putting out fires, like in the real world, he burns books and the houses that contain it. He claims his hands have a mind of its own, and over the years he has worked, he has stolen a number of books. After he has seen a woman committing suicide for the honour of books and what they mean, he begins to question the very order of the world. In the city, where he lives, everything is superficial and fake with no one loving no one. With the help of an old man, he tries to make the world understand but fails. However, he does seem hopeful for a future where people will listen, waiting in the country with similar people like him. 

It made me question a lot of things in life, and to me, that means it is a good book. It made me realize how important books were, and that it lets us experience life even though we have never lived in place of that character or in this setting. This book, written over 60 years ago, holds true to our present world, and that, to me, is the most frightening thing ever.

Bria

The US is too "Christian" of a country to ever ban the Bible.

some dystopian mixed with bitter truth of reality. second time around reading this and I’m more appreciative of this text. The parallels  are unfortunate lol 

Jennifer Biedebach

Monicap

He could feel the Hound, like autumn, come cold and dry and swift, like a wind that didn’t stir grass, that didn’t jar windows or disturb leaf shadows on the white sidewalks as it passed. The Hound did not touch the world. It carried its silence with it, so you could feel the silence build up a pressure behind you all across town. 
I was surprised. See, I DON’T LIKE CLASSICS.
I don’t care how much you protest. Classics are the only good literature! Far better than that drivel we have nowadays!
You know what? nowadays, while there is plenty of drivel (trust me, I’ve read it (Prince of Wolves)) but we also have books full of witty dialogue and well-developed, believable characters, well-constructed plots, in-depth world-building and some of them even have pretty nice writing to boot.
Sorry bout the tangent.
I did not read this book for a class or anything. I picked it up because one of my best friends told me to read it or else. And you know what? I’ll bet I missed a lot of the symbolism and shit I would’ve noticed had I read with a class. But whatever. THIS IS THE FIRST (non-Shakespearian) CLASSIC I’VE EVER LIKED.
I could have done with a little more character development, but I liked it anyway.
I liked the plot. The plot was about a man discovering that his world was more than he thought, and that he had to escape. There was some good action to keep me interested. 
I liked the characters. Montag, Clarisse (view spoiler)[even though I think Clarisse’s death came a little out of nowhere (hide spoiler)], Faber (Especially Faber)
And I loved the concept. The concept, while undoubtedly terrifying (a world where books are illegal? Where they are burned?) it seems… plausible. Honestly, that it is the BEST way to try to control a populace. By taking away their knowledge. By taking away their books.
Think about that thought. Scary, isn’t it?

Luke Harkness

Got a lot of time for this story 

There were two things I loved about this book: firstly, I adored the writing style. Ray Bradbury knows how to make a scene feel quick and urgent with the way he writes and he's got a great way of using metaphors and illustrating the characters feelings. Secondly, I love the message this book gives. A future where books are banned because they give people ideas and get them talking. The story goes that headlines became shorter, stories became less informative and eventually it was thought a better idea to simply rid the world of print media. Does that sound like a lot of clickbait and "fake news" you've read recently? Unfortauntely we can't burn the internet like books.

Sarah Sammis

Read it first in 8th grade and then again as an adult. It's interesting to read in the context of TV and social media.

maitha mana

"Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you'll drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth on his ass."

Lindy

Prior to this week, I had never actually read Fahrenheit 451, I'd just managed to consume at least 70% of it by osmosis via quotations, articles, and online arguments. Surely, I thought going into this, there has to be more to the book.

Nope!

The ideology of Fahrenheit 451 promotes complex narratives over simple ones, specificity over mass appeal, and discomfort over safety. People describe this ideology as pro-free speech or pro-intellectualism, although I'd say within the text it'd be more accurate to say it's anti-censorship and anti-anti-intellectualism, in that it shows the deleterious effects of censorship and anti-intellectualism and not the benefits of the opposites and doesn't equip anyone to argue in favor of them, which is not a great place to stand on rhetorically. Less discussed is that the ideology is equally pro-individualism, and this is crucial, particularly in the Cold War context. Television serves as the main (although not the only; Beatty also specifically points to comic books and pulp novels) symbol of what the ideology stands against. 

The problem is that Fahrenheit 451 itself is narratively and rhetorically at about the same level as a mid-century Western film. There's very little humanity (by which I mean literally no one remembers this book for the strength of its characters), just good guys and bad guys and blowing sh*t up, and one barely has to think to realize which ideology is the "right" one. It's not like Montag actually becomes a more discerning or compassionate person or something over the course of the novel, he just changes ideologies. People who make the distinction of literature as a subset of fiction (like Bradbury does in the text) often place Fahrenheit 451 as literature, and I'm not usually one to participate in defining any distinction, but wow that assessment is wrong. And so Fahrenheit 451 renders its central ideology silly and the whole time I wished I was reading a better book.

In conclusion, I interpret Fahrenheit 451  as a novel with a very specific goal, and Bradbury failed to attain it because the text is too facile to stand on any other merits outside of ideology.

Isabella 

three stars because i'm not a fan of the writing. other than that, i really liked it! it definitely leaves you thinking.

Fahrenheit 451

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