Fahrenheit 451 - Student Talks

TIME WARP: TRANSITION TO UTOPIAN STATEHOOD

 4^th part (Juliane): The Philosophers of the Forest

When Montag escapes from the city where he is haunted, he swims through a river and gets into the forest. He meets a group of “outlaws”, people who learn books by heart to save them from destruction. Therefor they have to hide in the forest and put Montag up in their group when he finds them. Granger is one of them and tells Montag, who is now amazed by books, the following: 

“But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us.”

 That shows that Montag’s idea of a perfect world of intellectual, reading people is a fantasy.

And it gives a deaper potential to Ray Bradbury’s novel:

The meaning is not just: “Everything was better in the good old times…”

But it shows the ambivalence of both statehoods. The old one was full of crime and confusion, everyone could read stories about it and everyone was worrying. So the books were prohibited and the minds of the people were filled with senseless dung. That gives satisfaction to the people, because they do not know what to worry about. But if the people do not worry, how can anything get better? Or shouldn’t anything get better? It shows that a state without a ban on books is not the only truth and everything is well, but a state with a ban on books is worse.

Fire Brigades – a state institution  (Domenic)

 I.                   Typical features of firemen in “Fahrenheit 451”:

à “brass pole” (p.32)

à proud of their “engine” = “Salamander” (p.99)

à engraved by fire and smoke (p.30)

II.                 è p.7: Montag firemen “since[...] [he] was twenty, ten years ago”

è p.7: Clarisse asks, whether firemen didn`t “put fires out instead of going to start them” in earlier times

è p.7: Montag convinced that houses “have always been fireproof”

è p.30: All firemen have the same outward appearance => symbol for conformism

è p.31: In the fire satation: “ wall with lists of a million forbidden books”

è p.22: In the fire station: Mechanical Hound

è p.31: Montag wants to know what happens to people, who have books => “asylum”; Beatty: “Any man`s insane who thinks he can fool the government and us” => fire brigade not government or politics, but: substitute (in the book: no reference to government or politics)

è p.31: Montag aks, whether firemen “didn`t [...] prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going” in times when “homes were [not] completely fireproofed”

è p.32: Fire department: “rule books with histories of the Firemen of America”; assignment: “burn English-influenced books” => lie, imaginary

è p.36: Burn of a woman => comparison: to burn s.o. at the stake

è p.37 + p.96: Beatty knowledge

è p.47: Tradition of firemen in Montag`s family

è p.49: “job of” firemen “started around [...] Civil War”

è Necessity of firemen: “It didn`t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship”

      => “Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure”

“Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals”

=> fire brigades = guarantee for happiness; attitude of society: don`t cope with problems, supplant them (burn them)! [p.99: “Here we go to keep the world happy”]

=> fire brigades were created by the development of society

è p.55: Beatty: “The poor girl`s better off dead” = Clarisse => dangerous [p.6: “many people [...] afraid of firemen”] = just the opposite of reality: fire department is expected yearning, when you need help, when your house is burning/firemen = good guys; help people

è p.57: What happems to firemen who have books? Beatty: “We don`t get overanxious or mad. We let the firemen keep the books twenty-four hours. If he hasn`t burned it by then, we simply come burn it for him”

è p.104: fire department alarmed through : people denounce other people