Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 materializes a world where censorship is so strong, it influenced the near- disintegration of domesticity, the banning of books and other pieces of literature, and the absence of memory of a time where books and historically accurate facts were not so “covered up.”
Domesticity went into a strong decline after literature was illegalized. People began to lose their moral values. They took up violent forms of entertainment, such as running over animals and even fellow humans, indiscriminately, with their jet cars. Mildred and her friends watched bloody cartoons of white clowns killing one another. Children, especially those of driving age, take extreme delight in this vicious form of …show more content…
The ones who banned the books, according to Montag’s superior, Captain Beatty, are the people themselves. The critical work on Fahrenheit 451 often disagrees on what specific events of the 1950s are presented by the novel as the cause of the future, whether it is the elite who hold political power, the majority culture, or minority groups who are singled out by Captain Beatty as causing the start of the censoring of materials. Although Captain Beatty’s statement is somewhat prejudiced, it was the majority culture that is, for the most part, responsible for the censoring of literature. The rest of the blame is distributed amongst the three socioeconomic classes. The minority groups, or lower class in this case, found texts and documents difficult to read as a result of most of them lacking the means to gaining a formal education. The majority culture, the middle class in this case, found books boring as time passed, as Professor Faber stated in the novel. The elite, the upper class and government in this case, wished to stop the wars that resulted from their disagreeing theories and political statements. The banning of books also resulted in a loss of quality education. There were few books allowed in Montag’s world. Those few books had twisted and false facts inside of them. One such book is the fireman’s handbook. The book states that no firemen has ever been trained to stop a fire and that the first fireman was Benjamin Franklin. Ray Bradbury has even expressed the extent of the declining education in his other short works pertaining to Fahrenheit 451. According to Robin Anne Reid, “Bradbury’s own Coda provides a close reading of Beatty’s speech, along with information Clarisse provides Montag, as evidence that the majority population’s demand for conformity and easy entertainment is the primary cause of the anti- intellectualism and active censorship