Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, named for the temperature of combustion of paper, has stayed current due to it's always
popular subject matter - censorship. This theme is maybe more popular than ever today, with the current battles in the media over Free Speech laws and the Media. Bradbury's second theme in Fahrenheit is a good and evil contrast,
ignorance versus
knowledge. He uses excellent symbolism throughout the book to show that they are equally double-edged. Ignorance keeps you safe, knowledge makes you crazy. Either way, you are unfulfilled. Kind of a gloomy picture painted in Fahrenheit, but its eerily close to the truth. Bradbury starts early in this one with a quick plot twist right in the first chapter, a bold move, but it pays off. The foreshadowing used in this book was almost enough to make me skip a few chapters, but, in the back of my head I knew that the waiting and anticipating would make the climax all the more thrilling. The futuristic city Bradbury portrays is densely populated and overwhelmingly high speed, something like I'm sure a person that was alive in the fifties would think of our fast paced world. Bradbury uses other characters in the book mainly as bumpers for Montag to bounce off of on his way to free thinking indepence. However, the family and friends do give the the protagonist something to lose, so he has to choose. Ignorance and comfortable living, unlimited knowledge with serious sacrifices. Which would you choose?
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920. By the age of eleven, he was already writing his own stories on butcher paper. His family moved fairly frequently, and he graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. His first published story was Hollerbochen’s Dilemma, which appeared the same year in Imagination! In the spring of 1950, while living with his family in a humble home in Venice, California, Bradbury began writing what was to become Fahrenheit 451 on pay-by-the-hour typewriters in the University of California at Los Angeles library basement. It took him nine days to write the original draft.