SETTING. Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unnamed city in the United States, possibly in the Midwest, in some undated future

Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unnamed city in the United States, possibly in the Midwest, in some undated future. The sole geographical references are the fact that the city has a bus station where Faber can take a bus to St. Louis and Montag’s memory of meeting his wife in Chicago. The only time referent is Montag’s comment that the country has started two atomic wars since 1990. Within the city, certain locations are specified as important: Montag’s house, which is in the suburbs, Faber’s house, and the fire station where he works a night shift. At the end of the novel, Montag has escaped the city by means of a river and is traveling through a countryside, or wilderness, with other men, all of whom have memorized books and plan to write them down after the war has ended.

THEMES

Fahrenheit 451 ’s major themes of resistance against the conformity imposed by a mass media and the use of technology to control individuals are linked to its depiction of a dystopia. As M. Keith Booker explains in Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide, one strategy dystopian literature takes is to criticize existing social and political systems by extending the premises of those systems to reveal their flaws (Booker 3). Much of the science fiction published in the 1940s and 1950s presented technology as a positive force and space travel as a happy prospect for humanity; at the same time, America was engaging in World War II, which led to the development of atomic bombs and to the Cold War. Both Hoskinson and Mogen have examined the extent to which Fahrenheit 451 criticizes McCarthyism and Cold War attitudes. The novel also criticizes American attitudes toward and dependence on technology.

Bradbury’s main theme is the extent to which technology can be used for social control, specifically through the use of the mass media for all education and entertainment. The novel describes people being bombarded twenty-four hours a day by “TV class,” “film teacher[s],” and TV parlors and televisors. The technology is used to promote a mass culture and to suppress individualism. American reliance on the automobile is also singled out as a major problem, with Clarisse being killed in a hit-and-run accident, Mildred driving fast in the country and killing animals when she is depressed, and Montag himself nearly being killed by a group of teenagers in a car.

The dystopian future in the novel is also created by the social control of history and knowledge, enforced through the technology of book burning. Since access to printed knowledge and books is restricted, the only source for information is the government, which presents a distorted and simplified view of history. The government is not the only cause of this future: Beatty and Faber claim that the American population, in its desire for positive images and simplicity, demanded the suppression of books as complex, contradictory, and difficult. Beatty tends to blame “minority groups” such as specific religions, ethnic minorities, professional groups—anyone who objected to depictions in books. Faber insists that the “public itself stopped reading of its own accord. [The] firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed and hardly necessary to keep things in line” (87).

While some dystopias (such as George Orwell’s 1984 [1949]) put all the responsibility for oppression on the government, Bradbury’s novel does not show the national government acting in any way, with the exception of periodic references to planes flying overhead with bombs. Only after most Americans chose to give up reading, seduced by the simplicity and presence of the mass media, did the government step in. As McGiveron argues in “What ‘Carried the Trick,’” Bradbury’s novel is more an indictment of mass culture than of a specific system of government.

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