A couple months ago, my Language Arts teacher introduced a book we’d be reading and analyzing for the entire quarter: “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. When I first heard the plot, I thought I’d dread reading it and wasn’t too confident that I’d absorb the messages the author was trying to convey. However, when we began reading the book, I found myself enjoying it much more than anticipated.

“Fahrenheit 451,” written over 70 years ago, entails Bradbury’s prediction of what might happen to the world in the future if technology kept taking over. The warning he is trying to get across is that if we let technology constantly distract us, reject knowledge or new ideas, we have the potential to turn into mindless shells of who we could’ve been. Bradbury also warns against censorship, or suppression of thought. He presents these two ideas in the book by creating a world where the government burns books to get rid of any disagreement and control the ideas of the public.

The main character the book follows is Guy Montag. He’s a fireman, but his job is not what regular firemen do today. His job is to set any books he comes across on fire, along with the houses they are being hidden in. Just like everyone else in his world, Montag does not question why he is being asked to burn the books or cause all that destruction.

Each day after work, he walks home to his wife, who sits in front of her television “family” endlessly, all day long. One day, on his walk home, Montag comes across a young girl, Clarisse McClellan.
Clarisse enjoys being in nature, walking outside, and doing activities that the majority of the society would never get caught doing, rather than going to school to learn pointless information or sit in front of a large TV screen all day. She questions everything about their society, even asking about whether firemen really used to put out fires instead of starting them, which Montag downright refuses.

After meeting Clarisse, Montag’s whole world turns upside down. He looks forward to leaving his house each morning just to meet her, or watch her doing something unusual, He starts to question everything that he has known since birth.

In summary, “Fahrenheit 451” is a great book for people that enjoy dystopian, sci-fi, or political fiction and want to inform themselves about what could very well become the future generation.