Fahrenheit 451 Critical Analysis

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Ray Bradbury, in an almost foreshadowing way, provides hints at his view of the future in his work Fahrenheit 451. Bernard Malamud in his short story A Summer’s Reading and Ray Bradbury both illustrate an alarming truth and a horrifying almost-truth, respectively, that does not bode well. People aren’t reading, not as they should. Everything is “Pop culture” and music, and games, and even question forums but no one seems to read information and retain it for later; no one reads without being assigned it in school.
Malamud writes about a boy, well, a man who is jobless and mooching off of his sister and dad. This man, George, has no high school diploma, so finding a job is more difficult than ever. When prompted the question, “What are you doin’ in the day now?”(Malamud, 197) George, ashamed for being jobless, lies about reading a large sum of books to pick up his education. It is this very lie that connects the two books, in the sense of social themes. In Bradbury’s novel, the social
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The themes can be as vague as aforementioned, but when one digs deeper, one will find contrasting ideas. The protagonist in Bradbury’s work does not feel the pressure of social stigmatism towards books, as George in A Summer’s Reading does. Montag is bound by law to burn books, else he be treated as a criminal, or a psychopath. George in Malamud’s short story is not told he cannot read by law, it is only the stigma of society towards books combined with his laziness that keeps him from written text. George, in this way, illustrates an assumed majority of modern social individuals. He is slothful-that is, he is lazy and feels no responsibility to find a job, yet has the audacity to feel ashamed for himself- and does not grasp that his education is the biggest factor. Even reading a few fictional works could give him a bit of insight or a whole new perspective to change his life for