Happiness Finds You Finding happiness is a journey that many people call life. Being happy is a main goal of our world. Society tries to sell happiness as money, and pleasure, and feeling good all the time. However, it is impossible to control life. One cannot go through life problem free. Fahrenheit 451 is a book about what happens when a society tries to control happiness, so that everyone can always feel good. In reaching for joy, they tried to eliminate discomfort. However, the world is not a comfortable place, no matter how hard you try, and as long as there are ideas, there is conflict. Seeing this, the people of Fahrenheit 451 tried to eliminate ideas. They burned books, and in doing so, they burned the meaning out of their lives. They …show more content…
Mrs. Mildred Montag has the “perfect” life. She does not work inside or outside of the home. Her only responsibility is to have no responsibility for anything, to just have “fun” watching the parlor TV, driving fast, “talking” with her friends. However, she is one of the most unhappy characters in the whole story. She lives to watch the parlor “family” of characters, and at night she listens to two small “seashell radios” to drown out any thoughts she might be having. She has no conscious idea that she is not happy. Near the beginning of the story, Montag finds that Mildred has consumed an entire bottle of sleeping pills in one night. He calls the emergency number, and two machine operators come to pump her stomach. In the morning, Mildred does not remember a thing, and just believes she has a hangover, even after Montag tries to tell her the truth. It is unclear whether she actually tried to kill herself, or if she just kept taking the pills and then forgetting about them, longing for the blankness of sleep. Either way, no matter what she thinks, Mildred is not happy. Her life, the life the society of Fahrenheit 451 fought for, the life of constant fun and no consequences, is so pointless. Later, when Montag is outside the city, now under siege, with the book people, he remembers Mildred. She is in the city, and in grave danger. Granger tries to comfort him by saying that people are never really gone, their …show more content…
The people of Montag’s society are banned from reading books, and Montag’s profession is to burn them. No one wanted to suffer the uncomfortable disagreements that books and the opinions in them cause, so they removed the books. This caused people to stop thinking deeply about things, and most of them do not even realize what they are missing. There are still a few, like Clarisse and her family, and Faber, who know they want to think. Clarisse, when explaining why she is homeschooled, mentions that the teachers never wanted to tell her why things are; they just wanted to shove information down her throat. Clarisse wants to understand things, and to have the freedom to think, and so she is labeled “antisocial” and has to go to a psychologist. While the people in Fahrenheit 451 do not seem to be overly controlled physically, they have little mental freedom. That is why a woman burned herself with her books instead of letting the firemen take her alive. That is why Montag itches to read, even when he does not know why. People need to be free to have their own opinions and beliefs to be
Knowledge is Greater Then Ignorance In the distant future people are punished for reading books. In Fahrenheit 451 by ray Bradbury, the author portrays such a society. Captain Beatty is the Captain of the squadron 451, he once read books, and rejected them because he didn't trust what was in between the pages.
In a society where citizens see knowledge as useless, books spill out information and are burned to ashes. The unknown knowledge makes citizens have violent actions with their anger. The fact that nobody can have a free thought of their own makes them clueless, which explains their thoughts and actions: violent or not. This book is a society where books are banned. If you owned one it was burned.
In Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury, books are banned from society. Montag’s job as a fireman is to burn books and the ideas they contain. When Montag meets Clarisse, his peculiar neighbor, she causes him to reflect back on his life and realize that he is not happy. This causes Montag to turn to books to help him understand society. However, books cause Montag to lose everything he has in life.
Burning the books to them is showing that it is worthless and not necessary to have in their society. People are forgetting about the importance of books, and throwing them in the incinerators because they are seen as
Without those things life would basically be pointless. Montag's society is essentiallly all the same and emotionless. Montag is starting to realize that books are important and wants to know why the government is trying to get rid of them. “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a women stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
Have you ever felt alone, like no one in the whole world understands what you are trying to say, or how you feel? That is how Ray Bradbury made Montag feel in the book Fahrenheit 451, he believes that books are needed for communication, knowledge, and also the ability to react upon it. He feels like life without these things is pointless and has no meaning. At the start of the book he doesn’t feel that way, then he is called to go burn some books at this old lady's house. Normally they take you out of the house and burn it and they take you to jail.
All this shows how different she was from most of the society. Without knowledge and books, the society grew dull & dumb. People like Montag believed that they were the happy people, but that happiness was mainly due to ignorance like most of the people in the book. Many blindly believed all that they were told. They never stopped to think whether something logical sense or
Montag recognises his lack of emotions towards Mildred, demonstrating the dehumanization of society. Granger explains how society used to be, with meaningful lives and human emotions/relationships. Without these human characteristics, life is not valued and not seen as important. Because of this, the people spend their days doing whatever makes them think they are happy for that moment in time. No one thinks about others, or about love, or about true happiness.
If books were illegal would we read more? Ray Bradbury imagines a bleak world in Fahrenheit 451 where books are illegal and firefighters start fires instead of stop them. Knowledge is abandoned for entertainment. Tribulations traded for ignorance. Montag, a firefighter, starts to witness this bleak world.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” (Bradbury 155). This is a traditional quote that is most relevant to a story and modern day society. In the beginning, Montag would burn books with much pleasure believing that books are considered “evil,” but later on in the novel he confronts Clarisse. Faber, and Granger whom guided Montag to realize how wonderful a book can be, how much meaning and depth they have to improve one’s life, and how they can make one feel “reborn.” Ray Bradbury’s compelling novel, Fahrenheit 451, tells the story of a fireman, Montag, whom is trying to seek happiness, and freedom by thinking that books function as a human being that can help him solve the problem he is currently facing.
(10) The 'she ' the quote refers to is Montag 's wife, Mildred, and she is
She does indeed end up dead as suggested (on page 47) by Mildred when Guy brought her up in conversation. Mildred is on the other side of the spectrum where most people are, satisfied with their lives. Lives enforced by the police hinted to by Beatty when he said “Remember, Montag, were the happiness boys” (on page 61), a world with enforced happiness by the ones who also control the censorship of the world, “protecting them”. Today's version though much calmer exists, through biases and difference of beliefs. People who are different are shunned, like all time, but a similar note is shown in media, that when someone has a different opinion everyone just assumes that their opinion is invalid and should be changed, instead of seeing it in their shoes, showing
What makes a person to be an individual from others and society? In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the author develops the theme between conformity and individuality throughout the characters. Bradbury uses this theme to indicate how each action or idea that a character makes have some sort of effect. This represents the idea of a change amongst others and how these characters adapt over these changes throughout the book. Although Clarisse seems an oddly strange person, she shows Montag the differences between following others aspects, through the eyes of being individual and having a different mentality from others.
The power of knowledge seemed to be limited in Montag's society; books are the great evil that poisons the mind of humanity and drives them to make foolish decisions. Due to the fact that Montag lives in a community where people are fed lies to keep order, those who are seen to be different or independent, are discriminated from others, much like Carlisse is. She is portrayed as an outsider; they see her as an antisocial, which gives the government a reason to make Carlisse see a psychiatric to get her mind back on track. However, it is her differential mind that makes Montag change
Rough Draft "We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam." (p. 79). Faber illustrated the ironic element behind the novel Fahrenheit 451, the people 's obsession with obtaining happiness and having equality for all only caused over exaggerated rules against anything that may bring out a unique feeling or quality in someone. Rather than these try hard ideas bringing everyone together, it alienated the beauty of human nature and caused social separation, decline of knowledge, and forgotten individuality. Ray Bradbury brought to life a widely spoke of stereotype that happens in our world today, the men go to work to keep up their way of life while the wives sits at home obsessing over their materialistic needs.