Banned Books Week: In Defense of 'Fahrenheit 451'

Haley Brown ’15 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

There’s a deep sense of irony in the widespread banning of Fahrenheit 451. Published in 1953, the novel continues to spark controversy today, and is one of the most censored books across America. Yet the story, written by speculative fiction icon Ray Bradbury, is all about the terrors of book burning and the stifling of intellectual freedom. In this dystopian future, books are outlawed, and firemen set fires rather than fight them.
This short, powerful book follows Guy Montag, a fireman who has never much questioned his life’s meaning beyond the simple pleasure of destruction. He burns books for a living, and he enjoys the thrill with all his heart. His wife spends all her time watching soap operas on wall-sized television sets and occasionally attempting suicide.
Montag’s life is uncomplicated until the day he meets Clarisse McClellan, a happy-go-lucky neighbor girl with a fondness for nature, people, and accidentally probing questions. Clarisse’s innocence and joy for life confuse and perturb Montag, but it’s not until he and his squad are sent to burn down an old woman’s house that he begins to question everything. The woman chooses to burn with her books rather than evacuate and surrender, and her death haunts Montag, who had never dreamed that books could matter to anyone that much. Hoping for answers, he turns to his own secret stash of stolen books, hidden in the ventilation shafts of his house, and begins to read.
Thus sparks the beginning of Montag’s revolution, and with the help of an elderly English professor, he resolves to change things. But how much can one fireman do against the flames of censorship?
Since its publication, Fahrenheit 451 has seen generations of censorship–from a “special edition” in the sixties that, unbeknownst to Bradbury, eliminated minor curse words and vague sexual references in the hopes of sanitizing the novel, to modern schools’ attempts to ban the book for un-Christian language and thematic material. Bradbury would have none of it. As he wrote himself in the coda to Fahrenheit 451: “Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.”
Interestingly, it was Bradbury’s childhood experience of watching footage from Nazi book burnings that inspired him to write the story that became Fahrenheit 451–a story that has transcended its time and place and become a hallmark of anti-censorship sentiment.
But maybe that’s the point. After all, if there’s one thing to be learned from Banned Books Week, it’s that almost nothing can vault a book to legendary status like banning it. Maybe that’s why, over sixty years later, people are still talking about Fahrenheit 451, and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.