Content area
Full Text
Abstract. The pleasure of burning books consumed Montag, consumed him until the day the books burned back, their possibilities enflaming his curiosity to the point of existential immolation. Yet from these ashes, he rises. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel of ascent, an ascent to freedom that can be found only in knowledge. Superficially, the relationship between freedom and knowledge seems antagonistic; however, examining Bradbury's novel in Plato's light-particularly focusing on the images of the Cave and Line-can provide piercing insights into the inherent harmony uniting knowledge and freedom, rendering this antagonism illusory.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
-Ecclesiastes 1:18
IT IS TEMPTING TO view the central theme of Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, as a critique of censorship, but to do so would miss much of the point.1 Censorship is a by-product in Fahrenheit 451. It is not a tyranny imposed on society by an authoritarian regime, but rather a tyranny imposed on society by itself. As Captain Beatty explains to Montag,
Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico . . . The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder the books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. . . . You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? I want to be...