Farenheit 451

Government

In this book Fahrenheit 451 people in the town are brainwashed by the government into believing that burning books and houses are the right thing to do. People do not question the government; they just do what they are told to do without questioning it. The government put set rules and regulations in place for the people to follow. They are all about conformity and censorship in this society. The main character, Guy Montag burns the books at first just like the rest of the society, but later in the book he begins to question if burning books is the right thing to do. He soon stops burning books with the help of his friend Faber; he begins to say that burning books is bad. He wants to now read the books because of the knowledge that the books contain. The problem with this is that nobody else reads the books so the whole culture needs to change in order for the burning of the books to stop occurring. My reaction to this is that what is so bad about reading books? Books provide knowledge to people and increases ones wisdom. Books are meant to be read not burned. If you burn the books you are setting a bad example for the younger children of the society. If the young children see people burning the books then they are going to be apt to burn the books also, they are not going to understand what they are doing, and they are just going to follow what everybody else is doing.

The purpose of this book is to show how not letting people be individuals will ruin society. Everybody is their own person and everybody has the right to do the things that they want to do. There shouldn’t be set rules and regulations that the people need to follow because this is taking away their freedom. Everybody can’t be alike because everybody is their own person and has the right to make their own decisions. When everybody in the society is alike and they look the same then the society becomes boring because everybody is similar. One’s uniqueness and how nobody is absolutely alike is what makes society special and to disrupt this is not good for the society as we seen in the book Fahrenheit 451. The specific techniques used to achieve this purpose is shown by Guy Montag breaking out of the normal routine when he decides to not burn the books, this is a big step for society because someone went against the government for the first time. Also the Hound is a specific technique in the book. The Hound is used to show Montag’s courage and how he went against the government and read the books. The overall effect of this book shows that conformity causes people to not truly be themselves; it makes people be laid back and not make their own decisions.

In this book, the word “human” means you have no rights, you have to abide by the rules of the society, you can’t be yourself, you can’t do the things you want to do and you are conformed to certain rules and regulations. This view of humans in this book is the total opposite of what humans actually are in real life. We as humans can make our own decisions without having to abide by any strict or harsh rules set by the government. The government allows us to make our own decisions. We are not like anybody else, everybody is different and that is what makes society so unique, because everybody is different and everybody does different things.

Our depictions of the future reveal that the present is a time to nurture and take very good care of because it could be gone in an instant. We have to cherish every moment because at any time the government could take our power away of being free and they could control us like robots as we seen in the book Fahrenheit 451. If the government took our freedom away the society would become corrupt because we would not be able to do the things anymore that we used to do on a regular basis.