Fahrenheit451 - loose threads tying together

Fahrenheit 451. This book, I found quite odd in the very beginning. Things didn’t really make sense to me, but as I kept reading, more and more loose threads started coming together. It starts off with this firefighter, Guy Montage and his teenage girl neighbor, Clarisse. Montage is walking home from work late one night and there comes the girl. She is a free spirited girl who reminds Montage how the world used to be so free with fewer laws. As a man who is happy with his job, which is to burn books, what she says makes his mind start to rethink stuff. You see, this is a futuristic book. Set in a time where the written word is forbidden, where (as I’ve understood it this far) you can only drive super fast on the highway so they have made the billboards almost 50 feet long so you will have time to see it, and where robot dogs and etc. are more than developed.

Guy Montage seems to be somewhat obsessed with this girl, although he has a wife at home. Clarisse tells him about how she doesn’t go to school because to the others, she isn’t social. This seems hard for her to understand as she does not see how doing sports and watching a screen in a room with others, is to be more social than to speak with each other and explore the nature together. This mindset of Clarisse is clearly what makes Montage’s thinking going.

The cover of the books is of something that looks like a newspaper person who is standing on top of a pile of burning books, with the title of the book at the bottom. Apparently the numbers 451 stands for being the type of firefighter that Montage is. The word Fahrenheit is simply the measure of temperature in America.

Now I have only read about 20% of the book. So this is only the beginning of Ray Bradbury’s “dystopian study of future American society in which critical thought is outlawed” (Biography.com Editors, 2015). As a person who is not specifically interested in fantasy books, I found this very interesting. It does not seem to be a book that will be super unrealistic, it’s just set in another time that has not yet happened so it makes it easy for me to fell like it is realistic.

I do wonder how it will go on though. As Montage keep meeting Clarisse, his wife and him is not being on very good terms, and as his thoughts about what his job actually is. Will it be a drastically change in Guy Montage’s life? Maybe he will quit his job? Or divorce his depressing wife? No matter what, I truly believe that something will happen with Montage, he will end up doing something that will affect his life and maybe even something that’s illegal.

References:

Editors 31.07.2015 http://www.biography.com/people/ray-bradbury-9223240#synopsis (downloaded 13.01.2017)