Guy Montag is a fireman that lives in a dystopian, futuristic, American society where everyone is constantly obsessed with massive, wall-sized televisions and earbud style headphones when they aren't watching television. The TV obsession is so bad that it is commonplace to refer to television actors as, "family members." The country is always having brief 1-2 day wars with other countries, but no one seems concerned as they believe they are living in a utopia. As many books challenge the readers to question their personal philosophy and the meaning of life, and the inhabitants of this society prefer to feel happy watching feel-good television than confront their emotions head-on, the society has declared books to be dangerous and its up to firemen to burn them. Guy Montag starts the book being a good fireman and burning books as he should, but ends up keeping them and wishing to read them. Ultimately, he has to worry about being branded a fugitive for keeping his books.
I felt that the frame of the story was very adequate, but the way that Bradbury described Montag, the other characters, and a description of the society was rambling, under-detailed, and hard-to-follow at best. I also found the events of the final chapter to be very quick, sudden, and implausible. It was difficult to determine what was even happening. I found it also difficult to follow Montag's thought process. I don't even feel that we have a clear motive or a true change in the character that allows him to change from wanting to burn books to wanting to save and read them. All-in-all I found the actual plot and characters to be a mess.
However, I feel that reading between the lines to get a gist of Bradbury's overall world building can be beneficial to the reader to communicate a cautionary tale of a world so plugged into technology in all of its facets that it loses the desire and attention span for meaningful interaction with other people and even for thinking analytically about life.
The greatest loss of the people in Fahrenheit 451's society was their loss of empathy toward their fellow man; and a lack of any desire to recover that empathy. I believe this is a warning that even people in the 21st century can appreciate as the phenomenon of people who are too addicted to their phone or other mobile technological device to interact with the people physically around them grows more prevalent. I also have noticed anecdotally with my own friends that as their access to technology grows their attention span decreases. They begin to lose patience with sitting and reading an entire book and just want to read a series of tweets, or a two-page article, or a 30 minute podcast containing the same information. You can call it the TL;DR effect.
Fahrenheit 451 has bland characters, sloppy pacing, and an implausible resolution. As a novel, I can't recommend it with confidence. On the other hand, the novel's overarching moral serves as a good reminder that we only have so much time on our hands, so we should probably put away the phone/tablet/computer and stop reading boring clickbait articles and actually get around to reading Shakespeare. Your relations and our society will thank you for it.
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