In a dystopian future and in the modern world, knowledge is key. The story of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a dystopian future in which book burnings are common and anyone who is found with books are burned along with them. The people that burn the books are the Firemen, and in the novel there are two main firemen: Guy Montag and Captain Beatty. Once on a walk, Guy Montag encounters a 17 year old girl, Clarisse McClellan, who is not like the other youths. The society in which these characters live in is extremely uneducated due to the censorship of books. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury develops dystopian ideas to create a parallel between the books oppressive society and the modern world.
Ray Bradbury develops the concept of Conformity to allude to similar ideas seen in the modern world. During a conversation that Guy Montag and Clarisse are having on their second meeting, they come upon the talk of children and what life is like for them. Montag asks what Clarisse is doing out of school and he mentions that he always sees her walking around. To this Clarisse responds with, “ Oh they don’t miss me. I’m antisocial they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed . . . But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you?” (Bradbury, 26). Clarisse …show more content…
People are forced to conform, sacrifice culture, and are given watered down information for a seemingly better society. Ray Bradbury wrote these ideas into his novel as a warning for what the modern world could become. If we abandon all knowledge and just go with what society sees as normal, the modern world could become just as desolate as the dystopian world in Fahrenheit 451. But as the characters in the book, and people of the world will learn, knowledge is