Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, Prof. Zuccato Edoardo, libro consigliato Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Bradbury was an eager lover of books since his early age. His frequent visits to local libraries in the

1920s and 1930s fond of pop Sci-Fi, such as H. G. Wells’ books. We can find various historical epi-

sodes that inspired the novel, such as:

• The burning of the library of Alexandria.

• The rise to power of Nazis in Germany in 1930s.

• Stalin’s “Great Purges” against intellectuals such as artists and writers.

• The Cold War climate and its negative effects and cultural interferences, such as the threat

and fear of nuclear war we can see in the backdrop of Fahrenheit 451.

• McCarthyism in the USA against intellectuals suspected to side with the USSR.

• Growing influence of mass media such as radio & TV as social and cultural phenomenon after

World War II in American society, and their menaces and risks.

ANALYSIS

1. The Hearth and the Salamander

TITLE

The hearth or fireplace is a traditional symbol of the home’s comfort which is lacking here, while

the salamander is believed to be able to live and survive in the fire, and it’s also the name of the

firemen’s lorry.

STORY

Montag has four fundamental meetings in the first part.

1. Clarisse McClellan: the girl offers him a new view on the meaning of life, igniting a spark in

his heart, but after the 7 meeting, she disappears. Later, it will be revealed that she had died

th

after being hit by a car. She is very curious and wants to experience life in every detail. Even

her family is peculiar: at night they sit and talk instead of being hypnotized by the wall tv.

The meeting occurs at midnight, an hour of revelation. Clarisse evokes moments of intimacy

from his childhood, she speaks to him of the beauties of life, the man in the moon, the early

morning dew, and the enjoyment she receives from smelling and looking at things, awaking

in Montag a love and desire to enjoy the simple and innocent things in life. The turning point

is when she asks Montag if he’s happy, and he realizes he’s not; that’s when he opens his eyes

to the emptiness of his life with her innocently penetrating questions and her unusual love of

people and nature.

She wears a white dress because she is a symbol of innocence, as her name also suggests.

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2. Mildred: when Montag returns home from the fire station, he tries to establish a conversation

with her, but this kind of conversation is impossible, showing incommunicability.

Her mind is always distracted by something else, like the wall tv, used as a form of alienation,

against which Montag tries to fight without results.

3. The old woman: before she is burned, the woman makes a strange yet significant statement:

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England,

as I trust shall never be put out – Hugh Latimer, a heretic burnt at the stake in the 16 century

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along Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of London, an early martyr for the Protestant faith.

Ironically, the woman’s words are prophetic; through her own death by fire, Montag’s discon-

tent drives him to an investigation of what books really are, what they contain, and what fulfill-

ment they offer.

4. Captain Beatty: the captain tells Montag the story of the firemen, and also teaches him the

uselessness of culture and reading books in the society. At first, books were made easier to

help people “digest” them, then they were completely erased.

ANALYSIS

In the first part of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury builds the setting and environment of the book. Tech-

nology has replaced actual human contact for Mildred, just as it has for most of the city’s population.

She refers to the people on her interactive TV parlor walls as her “family.”

At present, Montag seems to enjoy his job as a fireman. Montag smiles, though he is not happy. The

smile, just like his “burnt-corked” face, is a mask and we discover it almost immediately when Montag

meets Clarisse McClellan. In a very few meetings, exerts a powerful influence on Montag, and he

is never able to find happiness in his former life again.

In this section, Montag begins to feel alienated from the other firemen. He realizes suddenly that all

the other firemen look exactly like him, with their uniforms, physiques, and grafted-on, sooty smiles.

This is simply a physical manifestation of the fact that his society demands that everyone think and

act the same. He begins to question things no other fireman would ever think of, such as why alarms

always come in at night, and whether this is simply because fire is prettier then.

This explanation makes perfect sense in a society as caught up in superficial aesthetics: in his expli-

cation of the history of book burning, Beatty equates deep thought with sadness, which he rejects

as categorically evil. According to Beatty, mass censorship began with various special-interest groups

and minorities clamoring against material they considered offensive. As a result, books and ideas

were condensed until they were ultimately eliminated altogether in favor of other, more superficial,

sensory-stimulating media.

Mass production called for uniformity and effectively eliminated the variance once found in books.

Most people stopped reading books long before they were ever burned. Captain Beatty, as noted

earlier, has been suspicious of Montag’s recent behavior, but he isn’t aware of the intellectual and

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moral changes going on in Montag. However, he recognizes Montag’s discontent, so he visits Mon-

tag, telling him that books are figments of the imagination. Fire is good because it eliminates the

conflicts that books can bring. Montag later concludes that Beatty is actually afraid of books and

masks his fear with contempt.

His visit is a warning to Montag not to allow the books to seduce him. Captain Beatty intuitively

senses Montag’s growing discontent with his life and job. He is, paradoxically, well-read and is even

willing to allow Montag to have some slight curiosity about what the books contain. Beatty can tol-

erate curiosity about books as long as it doesn’t affect one’s actions. When the curiosity for books

begins to affect an individual’s conduct and a person’s ability to conform — as it does Montag’s — the

curiosity must be severely punished.

Notice that Beatty repeatedly displays great knowledge of books and reading throughout this sec-

tion. Obviously, he is using his knowledge to combat and twist the doubts that Montag is experienc-

ing. In fact, Beatty points out that books are meaningless, because man as a creature is satisfied as

long as he is entertained and not left uncertain about anything. Therefore, books create too much

confusion because the intellectual pattern for man is “out of the nursery into the college and back to

the nursery”. Therefore, books disrupt the regular intellectual pattern of man because they lack de-

finitive clarity. His speech is filled with irony and sarcasm, and his description of reading strikes the

reader as passionate and nostalgic.

This society idolizes fire, which represents the easy cleanliness of destruction. As Beatty explains,

“Fire is bright, and fire is clean”.

As for Mildred, Montag comes to realize that their inability to discuss the suicide attempt suggests

the profound estrangement that exists between them. He discovers that their marriage is in sham-

bles. Neither he nor Mildred can remember anything about their past together, as she is more inter-

ested in her three-wall television family. The TV is another means that Mildred uses to escape reality

and, perhaps, her unhappiness with life and with his husband. She neglects Montag and lavishes her

attention instead upon her television relatives.

2. The Sieve and the Sand

TITLE

The title of this section comes from Montag’s childhood memory of trying to fill a sieve with sand on

the beach to get a dime from a cousin and crying at the futility of the task. He compares this memory

to his attempt to read the whole Bible as quickly as possible on the subway in the hope that, if he

reads fast enough, some of the material will stay in his memory.

The sand is symbolic of the tangible truth Montag seeks and the sieve of the human mind seeking

truth. Truth is elusive and, the metaphor suggests, impossible to grasp in any permanent way.

Furthermore, he is too ignorant to understand what he’s reading, so he searches for the help of the

professor. Faber in Latin means blacksmith. The Latin phrase faber est suae quisque fortunae means

that everyone shapes his own destiny. 10

If Clarisse brought clarity in Montag’s life, Faber shapes his destiny and choices.

ANALYSIS

Montag feels that the books written by dead people somehow remind him of Clarisse. Mildred still

does not see any possible advantage in reading and is angered by the danger Montag puts her in,

asking if she is not more important than a Bible. For Mildred, the family broadcasted on wall tv is the

only real thing, not the characters of the books.

Faber becomes a more important character in this section. Faber may have planted the seed of Mon-

tag’s inner revolution the year before in the park, when he told him that he does not talk about things

but rather the meanings of things, and therefore he knows he is alive. And although Montag knew

he had a book in his pocket, he gave him his address anyway, allowing Montag to choose whether

to befriend him or turn him in. Although Faber is a strong moral voice in the novel, he is reluctant to

risk helping Montag and finally agrees to do so only by means of his audio transmitter, hiding be-

hind this device while Montag risks his life. Faber insists that it’s not the books themselves that Mon-

tag is looking for, but the meaning they contain.

We are informed that the candidate who won the election was the most telegenic of the two. This

element shows the influence of media and outlook in contemporary nations. Television seems more

“real” than books, but he dislikes it because it is too invasive and controlling. People are unwilling to

accept the basic realities and unpleasant aspects of life: they need quality information, the leisure

to digest it, and the freedom to act on what they learn. He defines quality information as a knowledge

of life. Books at least allow the reader to think and reason about the information they contain.

3. Burning Bright

TITLE

The title alludes to William Blake’s poem The Tyger. Many interpret this poem, from Blake’s Songs

of Innocence and Experience, as a meditation about the origin of evil in the world. The first four lines

of the poem are: Tyger, Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This part is full of “rituals” of growth.

1. Birth from the ashes: Montag gets rid of Beatty by burning him. From a symbolical point of

view, this has to do with a sort of re-awakening of his spirit: now