Fahrenheit 451: Books

The title of the novel is actually a reference to the temperature at which book fire combusts. Books in the novel are the key element of the plot. The protagonist is a fireman whose job is to hunt down any remaining paper texts and burn them, along with sending the hoarder of the books into a mental hospital where God knows what happens to them. The main reason books are being burned in this novel is because of the increasingly anarchic and apathetic nature of people in the world during the novel. People have become narrow-minded, unable to think for themselves, and do nothing but blindly follow orders. They have become an obedient and thoughtless group of sheep. Some people have said that Bradbury wrote the novel using books because it was a critical statement on censorship of an author's work (ironically Fahrenheit 451 was heavily censored in high schools at the time.) The books are central to the plot because their disappearance and society not allowing books has been a primary cause of the "dumbing down" of the culture. The small hope that remains for their conservation is any hoarders who collect them and are not caught or those men that Montag meets at the end of the novel who memorize entire novels and retain them to write them down again when the time is right. The books in the novel could be interpreted as a symbol for the dumbing down of American culture due to the massive influence of modern technology such as television and radio. People became less and less interested and delving into a novel and instead went to the television or the radio to get a quick fix on information. They became a culture of technological dependence, which could happen and may already happen to the society that we live in today. The use of books in the novel is what really makes it such a timeless novel and why the message it conveys is still relevant to this day.