Essays for Fahrenheit 451 Text

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In ray bradbury's fahrenheit 451, the people live in a society full of censorship. Montag, the main character of the story, is inspired by a young girl to question law around him and begins to have doubts about what good they serve. In fahrenheit 451, censorship in the world consists of book burning, manipulative parlor families, and the intolerance of those who attempt to be an individual. Book burning in the story is done by firemen to supposedly prevent society from unhappy emotions and unjust thoughts. Any person who was perceived or proved to possess any sort of reading material was reported to firemen using alarms, which were sent to the fire station. On duty firemen then immediately went to the home of the lawbreaker and burnt the books discovered.

Houses were made fireproof in order for the firemen to burn the books inside the house without causing too much destruction. Immediately after the books are burned, the offender is arrested and taken to prison. Although book burning was the most abrupt and outlandish form of censorship, people experienced mind perseverance pushes people towards what they believe in, a person’s perseverance is determined upon their beliefs.

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In the novel fahrenheit 451 by ray bradbury, guy montag perseveres against society as well as himself in order to demolish censorship. Censorship was fought against to prevent the destruction of society and government. For example scare hell out of them, that’s what, scare the living day lights out! bradbury 98. This shows that montag persevered against the beliefs of others to abolish censorship by scaring others to a point were they were in disbelief, this proves that he keep trying show them his perspective on censorship.

How this shows that having strong perseverance will lead to greater and better thing. In addition montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him bradbury 119. How that show that is this shows that a big part of perseverance is decisions, although decisions may be hard to make but in the end good decisions are worth it. Perseverance does not come easy, montage had to make a vast decision when he killed beatty. Being strong and following through with what people believe in will require willpower and determination.

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For example beatty said and the books say nothing! nothing you can teach or believe bradbury 62. This shows that persevering against society will attract others to miss lead people however they must follow themselves and set the path that they wish to continue down. How this show that is that montag thought differently about the suppression of books, and became aware how society saw it. Phelps mildred’s friend said why don’t you just read us one of those poems from your little book bradbury 98. This shows that montag had persevered against censorship until others were in dismay, and until they were at a point where they had to use others to help them defend themselves. How this shows that is when people continue for 2 more pages 187 bull join now to read essay fahrenheit 451 and other term papers or research documents view: citationcitation html full text print e mail save export add to folder source: raritan summer96, vol. 16 issue 1, p93, 10p document type: literary criticism publication information: rutgers university french literary fascism book abstract: analyzes ray bradbury apos s book `fahrenheit 451 below and `french literary fascism, apos by david carroll.

Bradbury apos s focus on nazi cultural politics carroll apos s description of fascism as a crusade for preserving literature apos s purity carroll apos s study of nine french writers. Document information: essay last updated: 19960924 persistent link to this record: database literary reference center french literary fascism, by david carroll, princeton university press. Fahrenheit 451, ray bradbury encapsulates nazi cultural politics in a single image: book burnings. This powerful simplification has strong pedagogical advantages: it might even encourage us to equate the homey gesture of dozing over a book, slippers on, next to a reassuring fireplace, to a deed of underground resistance. Fascism, however, was not primarily defined by its politics of the book literature was not summoned to the bench at the nuremberg trials.

Worse, moreover, the political exploitation of the german auto da fe of the 1930s by the popular front bears responsibility for an insidious manichean delusion hiding the fact that fascism too is or should one optimistically say, was a cultural phenomenon. At least in this regard, david carroll apos s french literary fascism is a welcome reminder that antifascism did not hold a monopoly on culture. There were fascist men and women who liked to read books even to write them rather than burn them. Were they, then, fascist because of that? did fascism start with bibliophilia and belletrism? carroll would like us to think so. French literary fascism is a bizarre fahrenheit 451 in reverse: it pictures fascism as a crusade for preserving literature apos s purity, a crusade that went berserk.

It all started, we are asked to believe, with literary people upset at seeing literature apos s purity threatened it started as a campaign against literary hybridization and cultural miscegenation it put literature not on the fire, but in the freezer, to prevent it from contamination from the melting pot fahrenheit 451 below. Carroll apos s excess derives in part from a perverse use of walter benjamin apos s famous identification of fascism with the aestheticizing of politics. Benjamin was not merely speaking against fascism he was, more to the point, speaking as a marxist.

Close to brecht, he was trying to define the parameters of a working class culture, of a culture where work and proletarian values would serve as the foundation of an aesthetics able to supersede an art for art apos s sake tradition that prizes nothing more than uselessness, sterility, and destruction. Benjamin apos s cultural analysis of fascism, his definition of fascism as the aestheticizing of politics is not simply descriptive, taxonomic it is aggressive, committed, and polemical it is not simply about politics, it is political. When withdrawn from this militant context, what survives of benjamin apos s analysis? no more than what survives of october revolution posters when shown in a museum of decorative arts. Uprooted by the mechanical reproduction that now pervades academic literary criticism, benjamin apos s slogan is used to induce a strange political pathos the pathos of politics as unusual in books that otherwise are deprived of any identifiable political agenda. The more and more common use and abuse of benjamin apos s motto by more and more practitioners of literary studies is a striking expression of the pervasive feelings of political powerlessness in the field of literary studies.

It is, besides, a perfect example of the nostalgic hall of mirrors in which a typically literary ambition to be, or to sound, political leads some academics to play ostrich, to indulge in a rather short sighted longing for politics a politics that in the end consists of little more than a condemnation of aesthetics itself. It not only takes the condemnation of fascism for granted, it goes a giant step further. Condemning fascism is fine, but hardly enough one must, according to carroll, condemn it for the right reasons, and for him the right reasons turn out to be literary ones.

Political scientists, it would seem, are not trained in the right style of analysis. There is a kind of self expiratory exultation in all this, as if historically the last task of literary theory, literature apos s last bravado, were to expose its own self as essentially fascistic. For the nine french writers he studies, carroll writes, the cause of literature and art and the cause of fascism were basically the same.

The equation between fascism and literature must be turned into a general law: political extremism and the defense of the integrity of literature and culture constitute one and the same position, he warns. Even formalist or aestheticist concepts of literature that stress the autonomy or organic integrity of literature and art were used to support totalitarian set in the twenty fourth century, fahrenheit 451 introduces a new world in which control of the masses by the media, overpopulation, and censorship has taken over the general population. The fireman is now seen as a flamethrower, a destroyer of books rather than an insurance against fire.