Analyze the cultural context of Fahrenheit 451 - Essay Example

ose days, but also illustrates as to how pushing people into conformity in a way is antithetical to the very survival and sustenance of the human civilization. In that sense the character of Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 is any guy who moved by the sterile media technologies that deprive the human existence of the pivotal need to think and feel, chooses to come against the innate insipidity of such influences. Thereby it won’t be wrong to say that that the themes intermittently reinforced by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 that are censorship, conformity, cultural vacuity and shallowness of popular media are as relevant today as they happened to be in the 50s.

The liberal education and free thinking and creativity even today tend to be as challenged entities as they happened to be in his days. Though many readers are not able to sense at the first reading that consumerism with its innate moral vacuity and intellectual insipidity is a salient theme that Bradbury comes on heavily in Fahrenheit 451, yet counter-consumerism is the basic theme woven into the plot of this novel (Sterritt 36). Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953 when not only the cold war was at its zenith with the looming shadow of the nuclear war that immensely bothered the liberal thinkers of those days, but also the American masses were turning to the shallow entertainment being dished out by the novel media like television and radio.

So in a way if the fine art and leisure of book reading was not being annihilated by the direct state intervention as it happens in the novel, a generation incapable of pursuing any pleasure that demanded attention, silence and the capacity to think was driving books out of the popular cultural sphere. Bradbury’s’ hero Montag is a fireman who does not douses out fires, but actually starts them. In the novel books are presented as a great anathema to the cause of social stability and are thereby incinerated to prevent socio-political dissent and differences. The