Midnight Dreams

English
December 10, 2008


An essay response to: Fahrenheit 451
by Dilpreet Randhawa


A poison, spreading throughout a body, slowly taking everything over completely. This body is not a human body, but a body of society, polluted by people who just sit around, letting life do its own things, leaving their lives to someone else. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury captures just how bad our country would be if we allowed a “higher power” to do all our work for us, instead of stepping up, taking control, and having things the way they should be.

In Fahrenheit 451, the main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman. A fireman’s job is to burn books that can cause an idea. In short, every single book. In this time, ideas are thought to be an abomination, and a new, revolutionary idea is not acceptable. Montag, and also everyone in this era, thinks their life is a perfectly normal one, with many things that were not normal. However, a girl named Clarisse comes by, and blew all of those fake things with her own ideas. When she did that, just by the way Montag was thinking afterwards just shows how restricted and unintelligent these people were. Because of the government making sure nobody can choose to revolt, to choose to change, the idea of having an idea, is utterly impossible.

At one point in Fahrenheit 451, a woman is caught with having books, and her house is to be burned down. The firemen ask her to leave the house, but she chooses to stay behind. Montag doesn’t realize why. This was the first time somebody didn’t save their life, instead staying behind with their books. This represents somebody choosing to stay with their ideas and beliefs, instead of letting somebody control their mind. This woman pushed him over the edge, and he finally let go of these distorted ideas. At this point, he thinks “What are we doing?”

At this point, Montag begins to realize how messed up his life actually is. This has quite a bit of purpose behind it. At the woman’s house, he caught a book, and instead of putting on the ground to be burned, he had it in his hands. “So this was the hand that started in all…His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms…His hands were ravenous.” By this time, he already had been influenced by Clarisse, and he unconsciously thought about opening the book, showing himself these new things and ideas. He was now completely stuck on this concept, unable to move away from this idea, pushed into him by Clarisse.

Now you may be asking, how is this a problem in our society? The answer is human nature, which is lying about things that are important, things that people can fear. Many people look at the wall blocking the truth, looking at what’s on it, and then taking it all for granted. But some people actually think, and sneak past the wall, and choose not to believe the lies. Back in Bradbury’s time, during the World Wars, the government hid the truths about what we actually did, and completely blew other things out of proportion. This made the society either love it, or hate it, instead of just looking at the truth. When someone spoke out, the idea was shot down almost right away, and that person was instantly disliked. Not until after the war did the people know the truth.

Sometimes, our life isn’t what we think, or want it to be. But when the truth is distorted, and even bended to hide the real truth, and it’s instead a fake, a large problem comes into this world, and it might not even be a real world again. This book truly shows what can and definitely will happen if we allow such a thing like this to happen, to let a higher power control us, and fill our heads with useless lies, instead of us choosing to know the reality, and controlling our own lives.