Alternative Perspective: A Stylistic Reading

Fahrenheit 451 — the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns — has its origin in Bradbury’s earlier novella “The Fireman,” published in Galaxy in February 1951 (Eller “Finding List” 37). In a 1982 afterword, Bradbury describes how he wrote the original novella in a basement typing room at the library of the University of California at Los Angeles, where he could type for half an hour for a dime. He finished the novella in nine days. When he took breaks, he would walk through the stacks, enjoying the feel and smell of the books. The importance of libraries, places maintained by governments that contain books accessible to all, is at the heart of this novel.

The original novella was expanded (roughly doubled) into a novel, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. Francoise Truffaut adapted the novel for a 1966 film that Bradbury believes to be the best of the many film adaptations of his work (Johnson Ray Bradbury 139), and Bradbury himself adapted the story for the Studio Theatre playhouse.

Fahrenheit 451 is considered one of Bradbury’s best works. Like The Martian Chronicles, it received praise from mainstream critics seldom accorded those works published and marketed as “science fiction” during the 1950s. The novel has been in print continuously, and has received a great deal of critical attention from academics.

Rafeeq McGiveron has published two academic essays on Fahrenheit 451: “What ‘Carried the Trick’: Mass Exploitation and the Decline of Thought in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451” discusses the issue of what caused the decline in society; readers and Bradbury himself tend to blame pressure from minority groups within society for the decline, but the text itself shows more of the blame belonging to mass culture. McGiveron’s “‘Do You Know the Legend of Hercules and Antaeus’: The Wilderness in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451” analyzes the importance of the wilderness in the novel as both beautiful and optimistic but also humbling and powerful. Another scholar, Kevin Hoskinson in “The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury’s Cold War Novels” shows how both novels deal with social issues America faced during the Cold War years, especially “government oppression of the individual, the hazards of an atomic age, recivilization of society, and the divided nature of the ‘Cold War Man’” (Hoskinson 346).

Susan Spencer, an academic critic who writes on literacy issues in science fiction, compares Fahrenheit 451 with another dystopian novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) by Walter M. Miller, in a discussion of the way the two novels present the “post-apocalyptic library,” the existence of an oral tradition, in which knowledge is handed down verbally, and a literate tradition, in which knowledge is written down. Diane Wood, in “Bradbury and Atwood: Exile as Rational Decision,” compares Fahrenheit 451 to Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) in their strongly political visions of a future mass culture in which reading is a heroic act. Mogen devotes a chapter to the novel, focusing on its satire of McCarthyism and its lyrical intensity.

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