I read Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 when I was in high school, along with everything else he wrote that was in local branch of the public library. That was a long time ago. and I only remember bits and pieces. Last spring, though, when I started thinking about what I might teach in English 100 this fall, I wondered if today’s students might get something out of this novel. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman living some 400 years (I think) in the future, except his job isn’t putting fires out: it’s burning books. You probably already know that. Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that’s famous; its premise is known even by people who haven’t read it. I was particularly curious about how Bradbury’s vision of the future (really a vision of his present, of course) might come across in our current era of generative AI and (from what I see in classrooms) plummetting reading skills. So I put it on the syllabus. Yesterday, I decided I’d better reread the thing, so I could start thinking about how I was going to teach it.
I was pleasantly surprised at how well Fahrenheit 451 has aged. Some of the prose is overwrought, sure, but much of it effectively conveys the strange world Bradbury imagines. Montag isn’t an intellectual and his resistance to that world is primarily based in his emotions, but the novel allows a supporter of the way things are, Captain Beatty, to explain the rationale for suppressing literature, and while Bradbury clearly doesn’t want us to come away agreeing with Beatty, the argument about reading and thinking leading to conflict and a lack of social cohesion is worth considering before dismissing it. After all, there’s a lot of conflict and not a lot of cohesion or community in the terribly lonely place Bradbury imagines, and people respond to their deep unhappiness (which is mostly hidden from themselves) in a variety of self-destructive ways–and in ways that harm others, too. I wonder what my students will make of it, though. I’ll find out in a couple of weeks.