This is a quick book summary and analysis for Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This channel discusses and reviews books, novels, and short stories through drawing...poorly.
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This is a story about a man named Guy Montag who is a fireman. He's not a fireman by today's standards though. Instead of putting out fires, he starts them by burning books, which are outlawed by the government.
After talking to his neighbor, Clarisse, Guy begins to question his work. He looks around and sees a wife who doesn't love him and an entire society caught up in technology and war. People kill each other every day and no one seems to care.
After learning that Clarisse died, Guy further begins to question whether or not he is doing the right thing by burning books. So much so, that he steals a book before burning a lady and pile of books.
His fire captain, Beatty, notices changes in Guy and watches him carefully. Guy reveals to his wife that he's had a small collection of books in their house and they try to read them together, but his wife is disinterested.
Guy meets an old English professor, Faber, and they decide to fight the government.
Meanwhile, when Guy is at work, they get an alarm that books have been discovered. Surprisingly, the firemen end up at Guy's house.
Guy is forced to burn all of his books with a flamethrower, but then kills Beatty when provoked. He grabs what books he can and runs to Faber's house for a last goodbye.
The government has a full televised search for Guy, even using a mechanical search dog to track him. Guy makes it out of the city and travels down the river, where he meets a group of runaways. There, he learns that they all have memorized books, a human library of literature.
In the end, the runaways see the city being destroyed by enemy bombs and prepare for the grim future.
So why does this society not like books? What did book ever do to people? In this society, people have chosen to not read books. It's that simple. The majority of people stopped reading and instead wanted entertainment with bite-sized portions of educational information.
From there, the government decided that books should be banned because books contained conflicting ideas that brought about arguments and conflicts. So rather than have a marketplace of ideas, the government wanted to streamline thinking so that everyone thought the same way. And what's scary is that this doesn't seem too farfetched to happen in real life.
Most importantly, this story tries to answer the question: Why are books so important? As Faber discusses with Guy, books are valuable for three reasons. The first is that books hold quality information. The second reason is that books require time to read them, a commitment. And the third reason is that we have the ability to react to our world based on what we, as readers, gain from the read material. That the words in books are not just lifeless words, but carry meaning that has real life application in our lives.
It's not just that this old dead guy wrote some things for me to have to read hundreds of years later, but how do those words apply to our society today?
Even though technology has advanced our world, we still tend to see the same human problems from the past, so it seems that technology makes our lives easier, but doesn't really solve many of our most basic problems, like war, disease, and poverty.
It is quite scary how the author could have imagined some of the technology that we find ourselves using today. In the story, the society has fast cars, mechanical dogs, large TV screens, reality TV, bluetooth, and a host of other technologies. It makes you wonder how far we are from a world without books.
Through Minute Book Reports, hopefully you can get the plot and a few relevant discussion points in just a couple of minutes.
Music by WingoWinston from newgrounds.com.
7 апр 2013
