Fahrenheit 451 Quote Analysis

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The author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, uses literary devices and overlying theme to portray the treacherous path that censorship can take us. The literary devices Ray Bradbury uses to depict censorship are imagery and conflict. These two literary elements play off each other to create a truly censored world that can allow us to look into where the world may be headed. The overlying theme of censorship is to take what the two literary elements do and drive it home. All these pieces combined together show the path we could be headed on by restricting knowledge. The imagery in Fahrenheit 451’s world is stunning. Ray Bradbury does a fantastic job of creating the facade of a utopia and then slowly breaking it down with the depictions of the …show more content…
The way Bradbury describes the descending from train is welcoming and warm. It also hints that this world is advanced and streamlined. The cream-tiled escalator going up to the suburbs also clues us into the fact that this is a perfect cookie cutter world. This quote illustrates a happy world in a short paragraph but after this Bradbury starts to unravel this picture perfect world and show how terrible and censored it really is. This quote illustrates the turning point in Montag's mind and has striking imagery, “The woman on the porch reached out with contempt to them all, and struck the kitchen match against the railing.”(Bradbury,Pg. 37) The reason this set of events happened is because the Firemen discovered books in the woman's home and were going to light the home on fire in an attempt to censor her. Why this quote is so important however is that it's the first time the censorship is actually visualized. These are some of the ways imagery helps advance the plot and show that censorship is a dreadful …show more content…
Man, which is Montag Vs. Beatty, and Man Vs. Self. Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 caused Man Vs. Man because of the disallowance of books in this society. Montag never had conflict with Beatty before he started to wonder why books were banned and what it would be like to read them. This conflict inevitably leads to Beatty dying at the hands of Montag. The censorship in this society consistently lead to conflict that ended in someone's death. Man Vs. Self also emerges from the man tormenting himself over the woman who killed herself because of the books that were going to be burned. That incident starts Montag's curiosity into literature and causes him to steal a book from the woman's home. Montag’s inner conflict ends up with him tormenting himself about being found for having a book and eventually him killing Beatty over books and thus censorship. This is a nice quote about Montag’s inner conflict over the woman staying in the home ““There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” (Bradbury, Pg.24) These two conflicts help to illustrate censorship as a terrible path to