Ray Bradbury

Introduction

Ray Bradbury opens Fahrenheit 451 with an epigraph by Juan Ramón Jiménez: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." This short command to perform an act of disobedience mirrors the defiant action Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451's protagonist, and a group of rebels take as they seek to preserve human culture and, in doing so, defy the law of the land. Montag and company rebel against a totalitarian government by doing something most of us take for granted, something we tend to view as a passive activity that provides intellectual growth and a respite from our day-to-day lives. They read. As we turn the pages of Bradbury's dystopic novel, we occupy a close space with Montag, who comes to see the inadequacies of the civil order, ignores the totalitarian state's prohibitions, and encourages others to become literate. By the end of this story about literacy, censorship, and the power of the word in resisting civil authority, we and Guy Montag see books as mirrors for self-understanding, repositories of culture and myth, and ultimately tools with which to build a new society.

Discussion

While many contradictory definitions for the term exist, especially in contemporary political theory and law studies, where thinkers often argue over what civil disobedience is and is not, the term is generally understood in literary studies as it was practiced and written about by two key figures, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), two pacifists who practiced nonviolent protest as a means of objecting to laws that violated foundational human rights. Both Gandhi and Thoreau believed in the possibility of changing the governmental machine through nonviolent means. In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau proclaims, "The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines … In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense …" (229). For Thoreau, serving the state in this fashion means strengthening the government's tyrannical hold and failing to develop the capacity for judging, deciding and choosing associated with the cultivation of the moral sense. Thus, he challenges citizens to do everything possible to end governmental intervention in private lives. For Thoreau, freedom can only exist when individual autonomy is honored: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly" (246).

The first section of the story, "The Hearth and the Salamander," describes the steps Montag takes as he first realizes not only the confines of his own life, but also the role he has played in confining others. At the onset of the novel, he is satisfied with his life. The opening chapter describes the "pleasure" he derives from watching "things eaten, to see things blacken and changed." Montag senses the power he wields and is proud of his position in society. He is a man to be respected, a defender of the ...