I picked up Fahrenheit 451 only after experiencing a silent internal crisis deriving from Kerouac's word count. I saw the name "Bradbury," thumbed through the pages, and decided that yes, this would be the book I was going to fully dedicate myself towards dissecting before 7 AM tomorrow morn. This shall do.
The beginning pages paint a picture in which a man named Montag indulges his pyromania. One of the very first things I noticed myself enjoying about this book is Bradbury's knack for illustration, and his language absolutely claws itself out from the paper in the opening description:
"With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal the ruins of history."
We later learn Montag to be a fireman--though in this kind of dystopian world, such an occupation requires him to start fires rather than extinguish them. Many contradictory elements exist in F451's futuristic arena; people get arrested for going too slow on the highway rather than speeding, pedestrians are equivalent to criminal loiterers, and burning books is an act of justice.
Montag ends his day at the fire station and runs into a girl, Clarisse McLellan, a new neighbor. Clarisse says a bunch of peculiar things and bids him goodbye by asking Montag, "Are you happy?" Of course I am, he insists at the time, but by the time he's entering his bedroom (which he notably compares to a mausoleum) the truth of his unhappiness is eating at him. Things are further complicated when Montag finds his wife Mildred in a hazy, half-alive sort of state after she downed an entire sleeping pill bottle. "Strangers" pump her stomach and replace her blood and the amateur medics make remarks so offhand it's almost as if they're talking about the weather. Suicide attempts are apparently incredibly common in this world: "Someone else just jumped off the cap of a pillbox," one of them says.
The next morning, Mildred denies having done such a thing. Montag goes to work as usual and over the course of the next several days finds himself being more and more affected by Clarisse McLellan's peculiar words. By the end of this section, Montag is doubting the supposed history of firemen and steals a book from a house rather than burning it with the others. The house in particular belongs to a woman who dies with her books purposefully like a martyr; her death marks the end of this particular section.
Throughout reading this I had flashbacks to The Book Thief (which I also, by pure coincidence, read last-minute the day before 9th grade). Though Bradbury weaves a world filled with fictionalized history, TBF has its roots in actual events--Nazi book burning. The protagonist of that novel also steals a text from the flames she is expected to fan. Rebellion in the form of preserving the written word is an interesting concept.
Placing this novel in the context of the situation it was written in--the world Bradbury lived at the time--allows for my further understanding of the past as a reader. Television is an almost escapist medium in F451, and because this book was written in the early '50s, it makes so much sense that this author would fear the TV takeover. Also in this novel, teenagers are noted to frequently act out (sometimes violently) to demonstrate their nonconformity, indicative of the Beatniks and the greasers and the subversive subculture much of 1950's youth found home in. As I really enjoy history, I personally find this piece of fiction to bridge the 60+ years that separate me from circa-F451 Bradbury.
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