Filed under: + Introduction
Bradbury´s tale suggests that we have lost our humanity in the search for knowledge and technological advancement. Thus, his dystopian world both represents and decries modern alienation, itself a symptom of unbridled “progress” in which, by following blind ideals, “we can hardly escape from ourselves”.
“It was a pleasure to burn”, begins Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451. “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed”. In the decade following Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Bradbury´s eye-catching opening for his dystopian novel assumes particular significance. America´s nuclear climax to World War II signaled the start of a new age in which the awesome powers of technology, with its alarming dangers, would provoke fresh inquiries into the dimensions of man´s potentiality and the scope of his brutality. Montag´s intense pleasure in burning somehow involves a terrible temptation to torch the globe, to blacken and disintegrate the human heritage. The opening paragraph of Bradbury´s novel immediately evokes the consequences of unharnessed technology and contemporary man´s contented refusal to acknowledge these consequences.
In short, Fahrenheit 451 raises the question posed by a number of contemporary anti-utopian novels. In one way or another, Huxley´s Ape and Essence (1948), Orwell´s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Hartley´s Facial Justice (1960) all address themselves to the issue of technology´s impact on the destiny of man.
Ray Bradbury is among the most poetic of science fiction writers. Bradbury´s evocative, lyrical style charges Fahrenheit 451 with a sense of mystery and connotative depth that go beyond the normal boundaries of dystopian fiction. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury has created a pattern of symbols that richly convey the intricacy of his central theme. Involved in Bradbury´s burning is the overwhelming problem of modern science. As man´s shining inventive intellect sheds more and more light on the truths of the universe, the increased knowledge he thereby acquires, if abused, can ever more easily fry his planet to a cinder. Burning as constructive energy, and burning as apocalyptic catastrophe, are the symbolic poles of Bradbury´s novel.
Ultimately, the book probes in symbolic terms the puzzling, divisivenature of man as a creative/destructive creature. Fahrenheit 451 thus becomes a book which injects originality into a literary subgenre that can grow worn and hackneyed. It is the only major symbolic dystopia of our time.