Ideas of reference and delusions of reference describe the phenomenon of an individual experiencing innocuous events or mere coincidences and believing they have strong personal significance. It is "the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to
one's own destiny", usually in a negative and hostile manner.
In Sigmund Freud's
view, "Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive
form, thus revealing its genesis...voices, as well as the undefined
multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the [paranoid] disease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively." As early as 1928, Freud's contemporary, Carl Jung, introduced the concept of synchronicity, a theory of "meaningful coincidences".
In 1946, Otto Fenichel concluded that "the projection of the superego
is most clearly seen in ideas of reference and of being
influenced....Delusions of this kind merely bring to the patient from
the outside what his self-observing and self-critical conscience
actually tells him."
Jacques Lacan
similarly saw ideas of reference as linked to "the unbalancing of the
relation to the capital Other and the radical anomaly that it involves,
qualified, improperly, but not without some approximation to the truth,
in old clinical medicine, as partial delusion"—the "big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words", in short, the realm of the superego.
Validation rather than clinical condemnation of ideas of reference is
frequently expressed by anti-psychiatrists, on the grounds, for
example, that "the patient's ideas of reference and influence and
delusions of persecution were merely descriptions of her parents'
behavior toward her." While accepting that "there is certainly confusion between persecutory fantasies and persecutory realities", figures like David Cooper
believe that "ideas of connection with apparently remote people, or
ideas of being influenced by others equally remote, are in fact stating
their experience" of social influence – albeit in a distorted form by "including in their network of influence institutions as absurd as Scotland Yard, the Queen of England, the President of the United States, or the BBC".
R. D. Laing
took a similar view of the person who was "saying that his brains have
been taken from him, that his actions are controlled from outer space,
etc. "Such delusions are partially achieved derealization-realizations." Laing also considered how "in typical paranoid ideas of reference, the
person feels that the murmurings and mutterings he hears as he walks
past a street crowd are about him. In a bar, a burst of laughter behind
his back is at some joke cracked about him", but felt that deeper
acquaintance with the patient reveals in fact that "what tortures him is
not so much his delusions of reference, but his harrowing suspicion
that he is of no importance to anyone, that no one is referring to him
at all."
Delusions of reference
Ideas
of reference must be distinguished from delusions of reference, which
may be similar in content but are held with greater conviction. With the former, but not the latter, the person holding them may have "the feeling that strangers are talking about him/her, but if challenged, acknowledges that the people may be talking about something else".
From the psychoanalytic view, there may be at the same time
"transitions...to delusions" from ideas of reference: "abortive ideas of
reference, in the beginning of their development or, in schizotypal personalities,
continuously, may remain subject to the patient's criticism...under
adverse circumstances, by minimal economic shifts, however, reality testing may be lost and daydreams of this kind turn into delusions."
It has been noted that a person "rigidly controlled by his superego...readily forms sensitive ideas of reference. A key experience may occur in his life circumstances and quite suddenly these ideas become structured as delusions of reference." Within the "focus of paranoia...that man crossing his legs, that woman
wearing that blouse—it can't just be accidental. It has a particular
meaning, is intended to convey something."
Examples
Persons with ideas of reference may experience:
Believing that "somehow everyone on a passing city bus is talking about them".
Feeling that people on television or radio are either talking about them or talking directly to them.
Believing that headlines or articles in newspapers have been written exclusively for them.
Believing that events (even world events) have been deliberately
contrived for them, or have special personal significance for them.
Believing that the lyrics of a song are specifically about them.
Believing that the normal function of cell phones, computers, and
other electronic devices is to send secret and significant messages that
only they can understand or believe.
Perceiving objects or events as having been deliberately set up to convey a particular meaning to themselves.
Thinking "that the slightest careless movement on the part of
another person had great personal meaning...increased significance".
Thinking that posts on social networking websites or Internet blogs have hidden meanings pertaining to them.
Believing that the behavior of others is in reference to an
abnormal, offensive body odor, which in reality is non-existent and
cannot be smelled or detected by others (see: olfactory reference syndrome).
Literary analogues
In Mrs Dalloway (1925), as a plane flies over a shell-shocked soldier: "So, thought Septimus, they are signalling to me...smoke words". The author, Virginia Woolf,
recorded in a memoir how she herself "had lain in bed...thinking that
the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the
foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson's azaleas".
In Margaret Mahy's Memory
(1987), the confused adolescent hero decides "to abandon himself to the
magic of chance. From now on his signposts would be words overheard
accidentally, graffiti, advertisements, street names...the clues the
city offered him."
The Naval Intelligence hero of Patrick O'Brian's Treason's Harbour
(1983) reflects ruefully that "after a while an intelligence-agent
tended to see spies everywhere, rather as certain lunatics saw
references to themselves in every newspaper."
In Vladimir Nabokov's short story "Signs and Symbols"
(1948), the parents of a suicidal youth suffering from a variation of
this illness, "referential mania", decide to remove him from a hospital
in order to keep a more watchful eye.
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopiannovel by American writer Ray Bradbury. It presents a future American society where books have been outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The novel follows in the viewpoint of Guy Montag,
a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring
literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and
committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings.
The writing and theme within Fahrenheit 451 was explored
by Bradbury in some of his previous short stories. Between 1947 and
1948, Bradbury wrote "Bright Phoenix", a short story about a librarian
who confronts a "Chief Censor", who burns books. An encounter Bradbury
had in 1949 with the police inspired him to write the short story "The Pedestrian"
in 1951. In "The Pedestrian", a man going for a nighttime walk in his
neighborhood is harassed and detained by the police. In the society of
"The Pedestrian", citizens are expected to watch television as a
leisurely activity, a detail that would be included in Fahrenheit 451. Elements of both "Bright Phoenix" and "The Pedestrian" would be combined into The Fireman, a novella published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Bradbury was urged by Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Ballantine Books, to make The Fireman into a full novel. Bradbury finished the manuscript for Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and the novel was published later that year.
The House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), formed in 1938 to investigate American citizens and
organizations suspected of having communist ties, held hearings in 1947
to investigate alleged communist influence in Hollywood movie-making. The government's interference in the affairs of artists and creative types infuriated Bradbury; he was concerned about the workings of his government, and a late 1949
nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer would inspire
Bradbury to write "The Pedestrian", a short story which would go on to become "The Fireman" and then Fahrenheit 451. The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy's McCarthyism persecution of accused communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury's contempt for government overreach.
The Golden Age of Radio occurred between the early 1920s to the late 1950s, during Bradbury's early life, while the transition to the Golden Age of Television began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually lead to Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books,
indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a
distraction from important affairs. This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her friends and is an important theme in the book.
Bradbury's lifelong passion for books began at an early age.
After he graduated from high school, his family could not afford for him
to attend college, so Bradbury began spending time at the Los Angeles Public Library where he educated himself. As a frequent visitor to his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he
recalls being disappointed because they did not stock popular science
fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were not deemed literary enough. Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, a great impression was made on Bradbury about the vulnerability of books to censure and destruction.
Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazi book burnings stating, "When I was fifteen years old, Hitler burned books in the streets of Berlin. And it terrified me". Bradbury was also influenced by Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression, the Great Purge,
in which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often
executed, stating, "They burned the authors instead of the books."
Plot summary
"The Hearth and the Salamander"
In a distant future, Guy Montag
is a fireman employed to burn outlawed books, along with the houses
they are hidden in. One fall night while returning from work, he meets
his new neighbor Clarisse McClellan, whose free-thinking ideals and
liberating spirit cause him to question his life and perceived
happiness. Montag returns home to find that his wife Mildred has
overdosed on sleeping pills, and he calls for medical attention. Two EMTs
pump her stomach and change her blood. After they leave to rescue
another overdose victim, Montag overhears Clarisse and her family
talking about their illiterate society. Shortly afterward, Montag's mind
is bombarded with Clarisse's subversive thoughts and the memory of
Mildred's near-death. Over the next few days, Clarisse meets Montag each
night as he walks home. Clarisse's simple pleasures and interests make
her an outcast among her peers, and she is forced to go to therapy for
her behavior. Montag looks forward to the meetings, but one day,
Clarisse goes missing.
In the following days, while he and other firemen are ransacking
the book-filled house of an old woman and drenching it in kerosene,
Montag steals a book. The woman refuses to leave her house and her
books, choosing instead to light a match and burn herself alive.
Jarred by the suicide, Montag returns home and hides the book under his
pillow. Montag asks Mildred if she has heard anything about Clarisse.
She reveals that Clarisse's family moved away after Clarisse was hit by a
speeding car and died four days ago. Dismayed by her failure to mention
this earlier, Montag uneasily tries to fall asleep. Outside he suspects
the presence of "The Mechanical Hound", an eight-legged robotic dog-like creature that resides in the firehouse and aids the firemen in hunting book hoarders.
Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for
her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall"
entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls.
Montag suggests he should take a break from being a fireman, and Mildred
panics over the thought of losing the house and her parlor wall
"family". Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, visits Montag to see how
he is doing. Sensing his concerns, Beatty recounts the history of how
books had lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their
current role: over decades, people began to embrace new media (like film
and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life. Books
were abridged or degraded to accommodate shorter attention spans.
At the same time, advances in technology resulted in nearly all
buildings being made with fireproof materials, and firemen preventing
fires were no longer necessary. The government then instead turned the
firemen into officers of society's peace of mind: instead of putting out
fires, they were charged with starting them, specifically to burn
books, which were condemned as sources of confusing and depressing
thoughts that complicated people's lives. After an awkward exchange
between Mildred and Montag over the book hidden under his pillow, Beatty
becomes suspicious and casually adds a passing threat before leaving;
he says that if a fireman had a book, he would be asked to burn it
within the following twenty-four hours. If he refused, the other firemen
would come and burn it for him. The encounter leaves Montag shaken.
Montag reveals to Mildred that, over the last year, he has
accumulated books that are hidden in their ceiling. In a panic, Mildred
grabs a book and rushes to throw it in the kitchen incinerator, but
Montag subdues her and says they are going to read the books to see if
they have value. If they do not, he promises the books will be burned
and their lives will return to normal.
"The Sieve and the Sand"
Mildred
refuses to go along with Montag's plan, questioning why she or anyone
else should care about books. Montag goes on a rant about Mildred's
suicide attempt, Clarisse's disappearance and death, the woman who
burned herself, and the imminent war that goes ignored by the masses. He
suggests that perhaps the books of the past have messages that can save
society from its own destruction. Mildred remains unconvinced.
Conceding that Mildred is a lost cause, Montag needs help to
understand the books. He remembers an old man named Faber, an English
professor before books were banned, whom he once met in a park. Montag
visits Faber's home carrying a copy of the Bible,
the book he stole at the woman's house. Once there, after multiple
attempts to ask, Montag forces the scared and reluctant Faber into
helping him by methodically ripping pages from the Bible. Faber concedes
and gives Montag a homemade earpiece communicator so that he can offer
constant guidance.
At home, Mildred's friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps, arrive
to watch the "parlor walls". Not interested in this entertainment,
Montag turns off the walls and tries to engage the women in meaningful
conversation, only for them to reveal just how indifferent, ignorant,
and callous they truly are. Enraged, Montag shows them a book of poetry.
This confuses the women and alarms Faber, who is listening remotely.
Mildred tries to dismiss Montag's actions as a tradition firemen act out
once a year: they find an old book and read it as a way to make fun of
how silly the past is. Montag proceeds to recite a poem, causing Mrs. Phelps to cry. The two women leave.
Montag hides his books in the backyard before returning to the
firehouse late at night. There, Montag hands Beatty a book to cover for
the one he believes Beatty knows he stole the night before, which is
tossed into the trash. Beatty reveals that, despite his disillusionment,
he was once an enthusiastic reader. A fire alarm sounds and Beatty
picks up the address from the dispatcher system. They drive in the fire
truck to the unexpected destination: Montag's house.
"Burning Bright"
Beatty orders Montag to destroy his house with a flamethrower,
rather than the more powerful "salamander" that is usually used by the
fire team, and tells him that his wife and her friends reported him.
Montag watches as Mildred walks out of the house, too traumatized about
losing her parlor wall "family" to even acknowledge her husband's
existence or the situation going on around her, and catches a taxi.
Montag complies, destroying the home piece by piece, but Beatty
discovers his earpiece and plans to hunt down Faber. Montag threatens
Beatty with the flamethrower and, after Beatty taunts him, Montag burns
Beatty alive. As Montag tries to escape the scene, the Mechanical Hound
attacks him, managing to inject his leg with an anesthetic. He destroys
the Hound with the flamethrower and limps away. While escaping, Montag
concludes that Beatty wanted to die a long time ago, having goaded him
and provided him with a weapon.
Montag runs towards Faber's house. En route, he crosses a road as
a car attempts to run him over, but he manages to evade the vehicle,
almost suffering the same fate as Clarisse and losing his knee. Faber
urges him to make his way to the countryside and contact a group of
exiled book-lovers who live there. Faber plans to leave on a bus heading to St. Louis, Missouri,
where he and Montag can rendezvous later. Meanwhile, another Mechanical
Hound is released to track down and kill Montag, with news helicopters
following it to create a public spectacle. After wiping his scent from
around the house in hopes of thwarting the Hound, Montag leaves. He
escapes the manhunt by wading into a river and floating downstream,
where he meets the book-lovers. They predicted Montag's arrival while
watching the TV.
The drifters are all former intellectuals. They have each
memorized books should the day arrive that society comes to an end, with
the survivors learning to embrace the literature of the past. Wanting
to contribute to the group, Montag finds that he partially memorized the
Book of Ecclesiastes,
discovering that the group has a special way of unlocking photographic
memory. While discussing their learnings, Montag and the group watch
helplessly as bombers fly overhead and annihilate the city with nuclear
weapons: the war has begun and ended in the same night. While Faber
would have left on the early bus, everyone else (possibly including
Mildred) is killed. Injured and dirtied, Montag and the group manage to
survive the shockwave.
When the war is over, the exiles return to the city to rebuild society.
Characters
Guy Montag is the protagonist
and a fireman who presents the dystopian world in which he lives first
through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, then as a man in conflict
about it, and eventually as someone resolved to be free of it.
Throughout most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes only
what he hears. Clarisse McClellan inspires Montag's change, even though
they do not know each other for very long.
Clarisse McClellan is a teenage girl one month short of her 17th birthday who is Montag's neighbor. She walks with Montag on his trips home from work. A modern critic has described her as an example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as Clarisse is an unusual sort of person compared to the others
inhabiting the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally
cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and
disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on
nature rather than on technology. A few days after her first meeting
with Montag, she disappears without any explanation; Mildred tells
Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by a speeding
car and that her family moved away following her death. It is implied
that Beatty may have assassinated Clarisse. In the afterword of a later
edition, Bradbury notes that the 1966 film adaptation
changed the ending so that Clarisse (who, in the film, is now a
20-year-old schoolteacher who was fired for being unorthodox) was living
with the exiles. Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was so
happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
Mildred "Millie" Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted
to sleeping pills, absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor
walls" (large, flat-panel televisions), and indifferent to the
oppressive society around her. She is described in the book as "thin as a
praying mantis
from dieting, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, and her
flesh like white bacon." Despite her husband's attempts to break her
from the spell society has on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and
indifferent. After Montag scares her friends away by reading Dover Beach,
and finding herself unable to live with someone who has been hoarding
books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and
abandoning him, and presumably dies when the city is bombed.
Captain Beatty is Montag's boss and the book's main antagonist.
Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books due to their unpleasant
content and contradicting facts and opinions. After he forces Montag to
burn his own house, Montag kills him with a flamethrower. In a scene
written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
Stoneman and Black are Montag's coworkers at the
firehouse. They do not have a large impact on the story and function
only to show the reader the contrast between the firemen who obediently
do as they are told and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in
his job but subsequently realizes how damaging it is to society. Black
is later framed by Montag for possessing books.
Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years
regretting that he did not defend books when he saw the moves to ban
them. Montag turns to him for guidance, remembering him from a chance
meeting in a park sometime earlier. Faber at first refuses to help
Montag and later realizes Montag is only trying to learn about books,
not destroy them. He secretly communicates with Montag through an
electronic earpiece and helps Montag escape the city, then gets on a bus
to St. Louis
and escapes the city himself before it is bombed. Bradbury notes in his
afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of
pencils, Faber-Castell; it is also the name of a publishing company, Faber and Faber.
Mrs. Ann Bowles and Mrs. Clara Phelps are Mildred's
friends and representative of the anti-intellectual, hedonistic
mainstream society presented in the novel. During a social visit to
Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives
and have a cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands,
their children, and politics. Mrs. Phelps' husband Pete was called in to
fight in the upcoming war (and believes that he will be back in a week
because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children serves
no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a
three-times-married single mother. Her first husband divorced her, her
second died in a jet accident, and her third committed suicide by
shooting himself in the head. She has two children who do not like or
respect her due to her permissive, often negligent and abusive
parenting; Mrs. Bowles brags that her kids beat her up, and she's glad
she can hit back. When Montag reads Dover Beach
to them, he strikes a chord in Mrs. Phelps, who starts crying over how
hollow her life is. Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading "silly
awful hurting words".
Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents.
Title
The title page of the book explains the title as follows: Fahrenheit 451—The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.... On inquiring about the temperature at which paper would catch fire, Bradbury had been told that 451 °F (233 °C) was the autoignition temperature of paper. In various studies, scientists have placed the autoignition temperature
at a range of temperatures between 424 and 475 °F (218 and 246 °C),
depending on the type of paper.
Writing and development
Fahrenheit 451
developed out of a series of ideas Bradbury had visited in previously
written stories. For many years, he tended to single out "The
Pedestrian" in interviews and lectures as sort of a proto-Fahrenheit 451. In the preface of his 2006 anthology Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 he states that this is an oversimplification. The full genealogy of Fahrenheit 451 given in Match to Flame is involved. The following covers the most salient aspects.
Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote the short story "Bright Phoenix" (not published until the May 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) about a librarian who confronts a book-burning "Chief Censor" named Jonathan Barnes.
In late 1949, Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one night. When asked "What are you doing?", Bradbury wisecracked, "Putting one foot in front of another". This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story "The Pedestrian".
In "The Pedestrian", Leonard Mead is harassed and detained by the
city's only remotely operated police cruiser for taking nighttime
walks, something that has become extremely rare in this future-based
setting, as everybody else stays inside and watches television ("viewing
screens"). Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies" for his peculiar habit. Fahrenheit 451 echoed this theme of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.
Bradbury expanded the book-burning premise of "Bright Phoenix" and the totalitarian future of "The Pedestrian" into "The Fireman", a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. "The Fireman" was written in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half hour. The first draft was 25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.
Urged by a publisher at Ballantine Books
to double the length of his story to make a novel, Bradbury returned to
the same typing room and made the story 25,000 words longer, again
taking nine days. The title "Fahrenheit 451" came to him on January 22. The final manuscript was ready in mid-August, 1953. The resulting novel, which some considered as a fix-up (despite being an expanded rewrite of one single novella), was published by Ballantine in 1953.
The
first U.S. printing was a paperback version from October 1953 by The
Ballantine Publishing Group. Shortly after the paperback, a hardback
version was released that included a special edition of 200 signed and
numbered copies bound in asbestos. These were technically collections because the novel was published with
two short stories, "The Playground" and "And the Rock Cried Out", which
have been omitted from later printings. A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of nascent Playboy magazine.
Expurgation
Starting in January 1967, Fahrenheit 451 was subject to expurgation by its publisher, Ballantine Books, with the release of the "Bal-Hi Edition" aimed at high school students. Among the changes made by the publisher were the censorship of the words "hell", "damn", and "abortion"; the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two incidents.
In the first incident, a drunk man is changed to a "sick man", while the second involves cleaning fluff out of a human navel, which instead becomes "cleaning ears" in the other. For a while, both the censored and uncensored versions were available
concurrently, but by 1973, Ballantine was publishing only the censored
version. That continued until 1979, when it came to Bradbury's attention:
In 1979, one of Bradbury's friends showed him an
expurgated copy of the book. Bradbury demanded that Ballantine Books
withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the
original version once again became available. In this reinstated work,
in the Author's Afterword, Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not
uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author's work, but he asserts
that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript
"mutilation".
The "Bal-Hi" editions are now referred to by the publisher as the "Revised Bal-Hi" editions.
Non-print publications
An audiobook version read by Bradbury himself was released in 1976 and received a Spoken WordGrammy nomination. Another audiobook was released in 2005 narrated by Christopher Hurt. The e-book version was released in December 2011.
Reception
In 1954, Galaxy Science Fiction reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel "among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more." The Chicago Sunday Tribune's August Derleth
described the book as "a savage and shockingly prophetic view of one
possible future way of life", calling it "compelling" and praising
Bradbury for his "brilliant imagination". Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote, "upon its publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary." Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still viewed as an important cautionary tale about conformity and the evils of government censorship.
When the novel was first published, there were those who did not find merit in the tale. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas
were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being "simply padded,
occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, ... often with
coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance [but] too often merely with
words." Reviewing the book for Astounding Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller
characterized the title piece as "one of Bradbury's bitter, almost
hysterical diatribes," while praising its "emotional drive and
compelling, nagging detail." Similarly, The New York Times
was unimpressed with the novel and further accused Bradbury of
developing a "virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture,
namely, such monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and
professional sports, automobiles, and other similar aberrations which he
feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man's existence."
Fahrenheit 451 was number seven on the list of "Top Check Outs OF ALL TIME" by the New York Public Library
Censorship/banning incidents
In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451
has occasionally been banned, censored, or redacted in some schools at
the behest of parents or teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent
to the inherent irony in such censorship. Notable incidents include:
In ApartheidSouth Africa, the book was burned along with thousands of banned publications between the 1950s and 1970s.
In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given "third tier" status by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida,
under superintendent Leonard Hall's new three-tier classification
system. Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the classroom
for "a lot of vulgarity". After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media
stir, and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based
censorship system and approved all the currently used books.
In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to students with all "obscene" words blacked out. Parents contacted the local media and succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.
In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list. Their daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to what she considered the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.
Themes
Discussions about Fahrenheit 451
often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-based
censorship. Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy
era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said
I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the
way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people
were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many
of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of
course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back
in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of
story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let
ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops,
and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and
we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.
As time went by, Bradbury tended to dismiss censorship as a chief
motivating factor for writing the story. Instead he usually claimed that
the real messages of Fahrenheit 451 were about the dangers of an
illiterate society infatuated with mass media and the threat of
minority and special interest groups to books. In the late 1950s,
Bradbury recounted
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills
one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood
staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a
small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this
sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her
right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far
winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and
down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This
was not fiction.
This story echoes Mildred's "Seashell ear-thimbles" (i.e., a brand of
in-ear headphones) that act as an emotional barrier between her and
Montag. In a 2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that people
misinterpret his book and that Fahrenheit 451 is really a statement on how mass media like television marginalizes the reading of literature. Regarding minorities, he wrote in his 1979 Coda
'There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world
is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it
Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist,
Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. [...] Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451,
described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a
page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when
the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed
forever. [...] Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years,
some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating
the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections
from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals
with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this
exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey,
one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and
republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
Book-burning censorship, Bradbury would argue, was a side-effect of
these two primary factors; this is consistent with Captain Beatty's
speech to Montag about the history of the firemen. According to
Bradbury, it is the people, not the state, who are the culprit in Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit's censorship is not the result of an authoritarian program
to retain power, but the result of a fragmented society seeking to
accommodate its challenges by deploying the power of entertainment and
technology. As Captain Beatty explains (p. 55)
...The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle
controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels
to be kept clean."[...] "It didn't come from the Government down. There
was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!
Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick,
thank God.
A variety of other themes in the novel besides censorship have been
suggested. Two major themes are resistance to conformity and control of
individuals via technology and mass media. Bradbury explores how the
government is able to use mass media to influence society and suppress
individualism through book burning. The characters Beatty and Faber
point out that the American population is to blame. Due to their
constant desire for a simplistic, positive image, books must be
suppressed. Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to
published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light. Faber went
further to state that, rather than the government banning books, the
American population simply stopped reading on their own. He notes that
the book burnings themselves became a form of entertainment for the
general public.
In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, "it works even better because we have political correctness
now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black
groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things.
The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control."
Predictions for the future
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unspecified city and time, though it is written as if set in a distant future. The earliest editions make clear that it takes place no earlier than
the year 2022 due to a reference to an atomic war taking place during
that year.
Bradbury described himself as "a preventer of futures, not a predictor of them." He did not believe that book burning was an inevitable part of the future; he wanted to warn against its development. In a later interview, when asked if he believes that teaching Fahrenheit 451 in schools will prevent his totalitarian vision of the future, Bradbury replied in the negative. Rather, he
states that education must be at the kindergarten and first-grade level.
If students are unable to read then, they will be unable to read Fahrenheit 451.
As to technology, Sam Weller notes that Bradbury "predicted
everything from flat-panel televisions to earbud headphones and
twenty-four-hour banking machines."
Mageina Tovah, Ray Bradbury, David Mauer (Montag), Jessica D. Stone (Clarisse), Michael Prichard (Captain Beatty) and Roses Prichard backstage of Fahrenheit 451 by the Pandemonium Theatre Company at the Fremont Centre Theatre, Pasadena, California in August 2008
In the late 1970s Bradbury adapted his book into a play. At least part of it was performed at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles in 1979, but it was not in print until 1986 and the official world premiere was only in November 1988 by the Fort Wayne, Indiana Civic Theatre.
The stage adaptation diverges considerably from the book and seems
influenced by Truffaut's movie. For example, fire chief Beatty's
character is fleshed out and is the wordiest role in the play. As in the
movie, Clarisse does not simply disappear but in the finale meets up
with Montag as a book character (she as Robert Louis Stevenson, he as Edgar Allan Poe).
The UK premiere of Bradbury's stage adaptation was not until 2003 in Nottingham, while it took until 2006 before the Godlight Theatre Company produced and performed its New York City premiere at 59E59 Theaters. After the completion of the New York run, the production then transferred to the Edinburgh Festival where it was a 2006 Edinburgh Festival Pick of the Fringe.
Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company staged a production at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena from April through December 2008, which was led by resident director Alan Neal Hubbs, produced by
Bradbury and Racquel Lehrman, and starred David Polcyn (alternated with
David Mauer and Lee Holmes) as Montag, Mageina Tovah alternating with Tanya Mounsey as Montag's wife, Jessica D. Stone as Clarisse, and Michael Prichard as Captain Beatty. The play was extended multiple times during its run for its reported popularity with audiences.
BBC Radio's second dramatization, by David Calcutt, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2003, starring Stephen Tomlin in the same role.
Music
In 1984 the new wave band Scortilla released the song Fahrenheit 451 inspired by the book by R. Bradbury and the film by F. Truffaut.
In 2025, one composition on the instrumental concept album The Ray Bradbury Chronicles was based on the book, with three sections (City, Escape, Exile) inspired by the key stages of the novel's plotline.
In 1984, the novel was adapted into a computer text adventuregame of the same name by the software company Trillium, serving as a sequel to the events of the novel, and co-written by Len Neufeld and Bradbury himself.
Comics
In June 2009, a graphic novel edition of the book was published. Entitled Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation, the paperback graphic adaptation was illustrated by Tim Hamilton. The introduction in the novel is written by Bradbury himself.
Cultural references
A protester against the Bhagavad Gita trial in Russia showing a quote from the novel: "– Do you ever read any of the books you burn? – That's against the law".
Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 refers to Bradbury's novel and the September 11 attacks, emphasized by the film's tagline "The temperature where freedom burns". The film takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and its coverage in the news media, and became the highest grossing documentary of all time. Bradbury was upset by what he considered the appropriation of his
title, and wanted the film renamed. He really didn't want to be
associated in any way. Moore filmed a subsequent documentary about the 2016 election of Donald Trump called Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018, but compared to the earlier documentary, there was a complete shift in interest by the general audience.
In 2015, the Internet Engineering Steering Group approved the publication of An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles, now RFC 7725, which specifies that websites forced to block resources for legal reasons should return a status code of 451 when users request those resources.
Guy Montag (as Gui Montag) is used in the 1998 real-time strategy game StarCraft as a terran firebat hero.
The numbers "451", and sometimes "0451", are often included as the first security code a player encounters in immersive sim video games as a reference to the System Shock series of games which first included the code as their own reference to Bradbury's novel.
The goldenmean or golden middle way is the
desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of
deficiency. It appeared in Greek at least as early as the Delphic maxim "nothing in excess", which was discussed in Plato's Philebus. Aristotle analyzed the golden mean in the Nicomachean Ethics Book II: That virtues of character can be described as means. It was subsequently emphasized in Aristotelianvirtue ethics. For example, in the Aristotelian view, courage is a virtue, but if taken to excess would manifest as recklessness, and, in deficiency, cowardice. The middle way form of government for Aristotle was a blend between monarchy, democracy and aristocracy.
History
Western philosophy
Crete
The earliest representation of this idea in culture is probably in the mythological Cretan tale of Daedalus and Icarus.
Daedalus, a famous artist of his time, built feathered wings for
himself and his son so that they might escape the clutches of King Minos. Daedalus warns his beloved son whom he loved so much to "fly the middle course",
between the sea spray and the sun's heat. Icarus did not heed his
father; he flew up and up until the sun melted the wax off his wings.
For not heeding the middle course, he fell into the sea and drowned.
Delphi
Another early elaboration is the Doric saying carved on the front of the temple at Delphi: "Nothing in excess" ("Μηδὲν ἄγαν").
Cleobulus
To Cleobulus is attributed the maxim: Μέτρον ἄριστον ("Moderation is best").
Socrates
Socrates teaches that a man must know "how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible."
In education, Socrates asks us to consider the effect of either
an exclusive devotion to gymnastics or an exclusive devotion to music.
It either "produced a temper of hardness and ferocity, (or) the other of
softness and effeminacy." Having both qualities, he believed, produces harmony; i.e., beauty and goodness.
Plato
Proportion's relation to beauty and goodness is stressed throughout Plato's dialogues, particularly in the Republic and Philebus. He writes (Phlb. 64d–65a):
Socrates: That any kind of mixture that does not in some
way or other possess measure of the nature of proportion will
necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself. For there
would be no blending in such a case at all but really an unconnected
medley, the ruin of whatever happens to be contained in it. Protarchus: Very true. Socrates: But
now we notice that the force of the good has taken up refuge in an
alliance with the nature of the beautiful. For measure and proportion
manifest themselves in all areas of beauty and virtue. Protarchus: Undeniably. Socrates: But we said that truth is also inclined along with them in our mixture? Protarchus: Indeed. Socrates: Well, then, if we cannot capture the good in one
form, we will have to take hold of it in a conjunction of three:
beauty, proportion and truth. Let us affirm that these should by right
be treated as a unity and be held responsible for what is in the
mixture, for goodness is what makes the mixture good in itself.
In the Laws,
Plato applies this principle to electing a government in the ideal
state: "Conducted in this way, the election will strike a mean between
monarchy and democracy …"
Aristotle
In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle
writes on the virtues. Aristotle’s theory on virtue ethics is one that
does not see a person’s actions as a reflection of their ethics but
rather looks into the character of a person as the reason behind their
ethics. His constant phrase is, "… is the Middle state between …". His
psychology of the soul and its virtues is based on the golden mean
between the extremes. In the Politics,
Aristotle criticizes the Spartan Polity by critiquing the
disproportionate elements of the constitution; e.g., they trained the
men and not the women, and they trained for war but not peace. This
disharmony produced difficulties which he elaborates on in his work. See
also the discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics of the golden mean, and Aristotelian ethics in general.
Each intellectual virtue is a mental skill or habit by which the
mind arrives at truth, affirming what is or denying what is not. In the Nicomachean Ethics he discusses 11 moral virtues:
Jacques Maritain, throughout his Introduction to Philosophy (1930), uses the idea of the golden mean to place Aristotelian-Thomist
philosophy between the deficiencies and extremes of other philosophers
and systems.
Eastern philosophy
Gautama Buddha (fl. 6th century BC) taught of the Middle Way, a path between the extremes of religious asceticism and worldly self-indulgence.
Zhuangzi was the Tao's most famous commentator (369–286 BC).
Tiruvalluvar (2nd century BC and the 8th century AD; date disputed) in his Tirukkural of the Sangam period of Tamilakam writes of the middle state
which is to preserve equity. He emphasises this principle and suggests
that the two ways of preserving equity is to be impartial and avoid
excess. Parimelalagar was the historical commentator of the Tirukkural.
One such instance is Ecclesiastes7:15-16, where the preacher admonishes his audience to "be not righteous over much" and to "be not over much wicked." Adam Clarke takes the phrase "righteous over much" to mean indulging in too much "austerity and hard study," and concludes that “there is no need of all this watching, fasting,
praying, self-denial, etc., you carry things to extremes. Why should you
wish to be reputed singular and precise?” Thus, the ideal of the golden mean may have existed as long as six
hundred years before Aristotle. However, some scholars, such as Albert
Barnes, hold a slightly different interpretation of Ecclesiastes
7:16-17.
Ahead of the times Rambam, 1138-1204 AD (probably due to Plato's and Aristotle’s engagement with Ethics),
determined that a person has to take care of his soul as well as his
body, and just as a person who is sick in his body turns to the doctor, a
person who has mental illness needs to go to the doctor of the soul,
which is, according to him, the philosopher or the sage. Rambam opposed the deterministic approach, arguing that a person has free will and the ability to change its properties.
The golden mean is also a core principle in Musar literature in which practitioners are encouraged to bring every character trait (middah; plural middot)
into a balanced place between extremes. For example, it is not good to
have too much patience, but it is not good to live without any patience
at all. Musar can be said to involve being mindful enough to bring one's
character traits, thoughts and desires into a balanced state in real
time; living one's life in accord with the golden mean.
Christianity
Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Catholicphilosopher and theologian, in his Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundæ Partis, Question 64,
argued that Christian morality is consistent with the mean: "evil
consists in discordance from their rule or measure. Now this may happen
either by their exceeding the measure or by their falling short of it[.]
... Therefore it is evident that moral virtue observes the mean."
Islam
Islam promotes the golden mean in many instances. The Quran
states an example in finance, in that a person should not spend all he
makes as not to be caught needing, and not to be stingy as to not live a
comfortable life. Muhammad
also had a saying "خير الأمور أوسطها" meaning the best choice is the
middle ground/golden mean one. In Quran (Chapter 'The Cow', verse number
143) it is said that, "We have made you a balanced, moderate nation".
Quran quotes the example of two groups of people, calling one of
them extremely greedy (Chasing the wealth of the world) in Chapter 'The
Cow' verse 96 and to the others as inventors of monasticism
(over-zealousness in religion) in Chapter Al-Hadeed verse number 27.
Islam counsels its followers to abstain from both these paths of
extremities and adopt moderation in chasing the world and practicing
religion alike.
Not the least the Quran emphasises that the Muslim community
(Umma) is a ’middle nation’ / a 'just community' / an Umma justly
balanced / a moderate nation / a midmost nation (ummatan wasaTan) in
verse 2-143: a middle between extremism and sloppiness.
Quotations
"In many things the middle have the best / Be mine a middle station." — Phocylides
"When Coleridge
tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty,
he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search
to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in
the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same
search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety." — Jacob Bronowski
"…but for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following." — Henri Poincaré.
"If a man finds that his nature tends or is disposed to one of these
extremes..., he should turn back and improve, so as to walk in the way
of good people, which is the right way. The right way is the mean in
each group of dispositions common to humanity; namely, that disposition
which is equally distant from the two extremes in its class, not being
nearer to the one than to the other." — Maimonides
"What is wanted is a balance between extravagance and miserliness
through moderation, with the goal of distance between both extremes." — al-Ghazali
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