1. Big Read Fahrenheit 451: http://www.neabigread.org/books/fahrenheit451/
Reader's guide:
http://www.neabigread.org/pdf/Fahrenheit451(6.2015).pdf
2. Literature Study Guides → Fahrenheit 451 http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/451/
3. Fahrenheit 451 and Literary analysis: http://medianet.pps.net/doc/n00004_tg.pdf
4. Literature Connections, Further reading: http://www.classzone.com/novelguides/litcons/f451/guide.cfm
5. Free study guide:
http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Fahrenheit_451_Summary
/Fahrenheit_451_Bradbury01.html
6. Fahrenheit 451- Book summary, Study help, etc.:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/fahrenheit-451/book-summary
NEA Big Read Discussion Questions: Fahrenheit 451
Prepared for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, Charlotte, NC, April 2014
Responses by Jonathan Eller
Director, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
Indiana University School of Liberal Arts
1. Montag comes to learn that “firemen are rarely necessary” because “the public itself stopped reading of its own accord.” Bradbury wrote his novel in 1953: To what extent has his prophecy come true today?
JE: In early 1952, between the time he published “The Fireman” and then expanded it into Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury began to see people in Los Angeles wearing portable transistor radio earphones (similar to his little seashells) so that they could shut out the world around them. The big wall TV screens would follow. These and other very useful wonders of our technology-rich lives can diminish our perceived need for reading. The great cultural casualties in postwar America are quality radio programming, the motion picture theater experience, and reading. Adaptation of literature and entertainment to new media, and the drift away from broad-based interdisciplinary education in favor of highly specialized forms of education, leave us less time (and little perceived need) to read. As Bradbury observed, you don’t need to burn books; just get people to quit reading them.”
2. Clarisse describes a past that Montag has never known: one with front porches, gardens, and rocking chairs. What do these items have in common, and how might their removal have encouraged Montag's repressive society?
JE: They are devices that slow down time, and encourage thought. These are all symbols of the world of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, nostalgic and filled with memories of shared traditional values, a time when the young respected their elders, where three generations of a family might live in the same house or on the same street, rocking on the front porch, or gardening in the evenings. They are symbols of the examined life. As Beatty notes about Clarisse: “She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why.” That’s what makes her dangerous in Beatty’s world.
3. “Don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library,” Faber tells Montag. “Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.” How good is this advice?
JE: Professor Faber’s cautionary tale within Bradbury’s timeless cautionary tale centers on the legacy of his generation. When they needed to act to prevent this kind of brave new world, they failed to respond. They thought that institutions, or leaders, or the warnings of history and literature and science preserved in the great libraries would save them, but they didn’t. Faber knows that action, for better or worse, is the better course for Montag: “…remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid moving cattle of the majority.” Montag must strike out on his own; As Faber observes in his last words of advice through the seashell, it’s now up to Montag to decide for himself “which way to jump, or to fall.”
4. One of the most significant of the many literary allusions in Fahrenheit 451occurs when Montag reads Matthew Arnold's poem “Dover Beach.” What is the response of Mildred's friends, and why does Montag kick them out of his house?
JE: “Dover Beach” draws meaning from the power of metaphor, the power of reflecting on the shingled shore of possibilities. It is a powerful poem, but for Mildred’s companions, the power is terrifying. They have no learning, no experience with poetry, and can only try to understand it literally. They inevitably fail, but will never know the magnitude and tragedy of that failure.
5. It may surprise the reader to learn that Beatty is quite well read. How can Beatty's knowledge of and hatred for books be reconciled?
JE: Behind the destruction of this inverted world where firemen set fires instead of extinguishing them is a very elusive and subtle kind of regulation. One must know the enemy (we are far more effective when we criticize a book if we actually read it first). The great unasked question in Fahrenheit 451, as in Huxley’s Brave New World, is the question that Juvenal asked his ancient Roman peers: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”—who watches the watchers? But reading also makes us human, and beneath the surface Beatty knows he has given up the ideas and values that make us human. He’s almost a suicidal figure, ready to be burned by Montag’s torch.
6. Unlike Mrs. Hudson, Montag chooses not to die in his house with his books. Instead he burns them, asserting even that “it was good to burn” and that “fire was best for everything!” Are these choices and sentiments consistent with his character? Are you surprised that he fails to follow in her footsteps?
JE: We should not be surprised by his actions, for Montag sees the third choice: he can continue to live and feed on his perverted profession, or he can die; but he can also find another way. Can Montag come out on the other side of our Modernist crisis-of-values, scarred but able to face what Robert Penn Warren called, in All the King’s Men, the awful responsibilities of time? His successful search for the Book People shows that he can. Beatty’s world uses fire to burn everything from books to the newly dead: “Fire is bright, fire is clean.” Montag finds another way.
7. Beatty justifies the new role of firemen by claiming to be “custodians of [society's] peace of mind, the focus of [the] understandable and rightful dread of being inferior.” What does he mean by this, and is there any sense that he might be right?
JE: Regimentation can maintain order in a stress-filled world, along with programmed recreation. This kind of regimentation feeds on a fear of otherness, of difference, a fear of those who question the vast leveling effect of an overpopulated and technologically-driven culture.
8. How does the destruction of books lead to more happiness and equality, according to Beatty? Does his lecture to Montag on the rights of man sound like any rhetoric still employed today?
JE: A world fed on trivia and “noncombustible” facts is a happy one. Books disturb the mind: “…books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe, “Beatty says. “They’re about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they’re fiction. If they’re nonfiction, it’s worse … you come away lost.” Beatty’s world is a world without faith or conviction, and doesn’t even know what’s missing. “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man in the image of every other …” These are slogans and signposts that predominate in an increasingly polarized culture, as happens even today in cycles of political and social upheaval.
9. Why does Montag memorize the Old Testament's Ecclesiastes and the New Testament's Revelation? How do the final two paragraphs of the novel allude to both biblical books?
JE: In its early novella form as “The Fireman,” Montag only recites from Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season …”). In the expanded form of Fahrenheit 451, Montag uses Ecclesiastes as the unspoken frame for his actual words: “Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something …” He chooses Revelation chapter 22and its restorative vision: the river of the water of life, the tree of life, and leaves for the healing of the nations. For Bradbury, this is a compelling wish fulfillment for the atomic age—the rocket is a symbol of both destruction, as experienced here, and life, as symbolized by the rockets of his famous fictions of Mars and Mankind’s journey to the stars.
10. Are there any circumstances where censorship might play a beneficial role in society? Are there some books that should be banned?
JE: Bradbury believed that censorship rarely surfaces at the national level—it’s more of a social phenomenon in America, locally imposed by school boards and library boards (though rarely by librarians). Books are banned (or, more accurately, regulated) for age-appropriate reasons, but the courts often strike down decisions where the authorities ban a book simply because they personally disagree with the ideas in the book. Note the final lines of Bradbury’s coda to Fahrenheit 451: “In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.”
11. If you had to memorize a single book or risk its extinction, which book would you choose?
JE: The books that are dearest to me have combinations of essential characteristics. Each candidate must be:
A book of ennobling sentiment.
A book of compelling ideas.
A book that helps us understand the world around us.
A book that helps us see and remember what makes us human.
For me, the book I would memorize is H. G. Well’s The Time Machine (1895). A single man’s journey into the far distant future where man has devolved, losing all the complex mental powers and most of the heart emotions that together make us human. Judging by the tendencies in our present world, Wells’ Time Traveler says that such a future is inevitable. But Wells’ narrator says, “Even if this is so, then we must live as if it were not so.” This is the book I would save from extinction.