American author best known for his

highly imaginative short stories and

novels, he inspired generations of
readers and viewers to dream, think,
and create. His shockingly prophetic
dystopian work Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
has been highly praised for its stance
against censorship and its defense of
literature as necessary to civilization.
SECTION SUMMARY

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 RAY BRADBURY
 1920: he was born in Waukegan, Illinois, and always
maintained strong ties to his small-town upbringing.
 As a child, he loved horror films such as The Phantom of the
Opera (1925) and enjoyed immensely the first science fiction
magazine, Amazing Stories.
 1932: he had an encounter with a carnival
magician which sparked his writing life.
 Wreathed in static electricity Mr. Electrico
touched him on the nose with his energy-
charged sword, and said, “Live forever!”
Bradbury later said, “I decided that it was
the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started
writing every day and never stopped.” 4
 RAY BRADBURY
 1934: his family moved to Los Angeles and in 1937 he joined
the Los Angeles Science Fiction League.
 1939: he published his own “fanzine”,
Futuria Fantasia, making his first sale to
a professional science fiction magazine
in 1941 with his short story Pendulum.
Many of Bradbury’s earliest stories
present elements of fantasy and
horror and in the mid-1940s they
started to appear in major magazines
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 RAY BRADBURY
It was the beginning of a career that spanned seventy-plus
years in which he wrote more than 400 short stories and
nearly fifty books across a variety of genres. He also penned
numerous poems, essays, plays, operas, teleplays, and
screenplays receiving many honours for his work.

 1947: he married Marguerite McClure and they had four

daughters (Susan, Ramona, Bettina
and Alexandra).
His wife of 56 years, Maggie, as she was
affectionately called, was the only
woman Bradbury ever dated!
6
 FANTASY in BRADBURY’s LIFE
 Not only did Bradbury create fantastical worlds with pen
and paper, he also lived in a surreal world of his own
creation. His home basement office was filled with items
that tickled his imagination: cartoons, figurines, stuffed
animals, masks, and magic.
 He delighted in doodling,
sketching, and painting: he
especially loved to draw devil
faces, pumpkins, cats, and
monsters, and even painted
a Halloween Tree which would
become a fantasy novel (1972).
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 RAY BRADBURY
 1953: he published the collection The Golden Apples of the
Sun and his masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, of which the
Boston Globe wrote
«It’s life-changing if you read it as a teen, and still stunning
when you reread it as an adult. Censorship is at the core of
the novel, which is both a literary thriller and a dark
meditation on the future of humanity.»

 1957: he published Dandelion Wine, an

autobiographical novel about a magical
but too brief summer of a 12-year-old boy
in Green Town, Illinois. His final novel,
Farewell Summer (2006), was a sequel to it.
 RAY BRADBURY
 1962: the Midwest of his childhood
was once again the setting of his new
novel, Something Wicked This Way
Comes, in which a carnival comes to
town run by the mysterious and evil
Mr. Dark.

 the 1970s: he turned his energy to

poetry and drama while in the 1980s
he returned to the mystery genre, so
dear to him earlier in his career.
 2012: he died at the age of 91 after a long illness.
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HIS PASSION
FOR…TOYS!!!
 Bradbury never lost his
childlike sense of play,
fun, and expressiveness:
each Christmas, he would ask his wife to give him toys
instead of any other gifts so his grandchildren remember
him as having more toys than they did!

 He had toy ray guns, robots, stuffed

dinosaurs, oversized stuffed animals
and even a head floating in a glass
jar—courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock!!!
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SHORT-SIGHTED OR…
LONG-SIGHTED?
 Though physically short-sighted
he saw far into the future and
had a deep concern for the welfare and destiny of men.

 Through his stories and in his life, he imagined ways to

create a better world and offered cautions designed to
sustain the one we have.

 Although he had no scientific or technical training, he had

an innate sense of what might come in the future: from
man’s interplanetary explorations, which fascinated
him, to his loss of critical thinking, which scared him. 11
 FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953)
 Regarded as Bradbury’s greatest work,
Fahrenheit 451 was written not long
after the Nazis burned books and,
eventually, human beings. At the time
America was living under a cloud of fear
created by McCarthyism, which brought
political repression, blacklists and
censorship of literature and art.

 Using the science fiction motif of dystopia Bradbury

presents a totalitarian, highly centralized, and, therefore,
oppressive social organization that sacrifices individual
expression for the sake of efficiency and social harmony,
all of which are achieved through technocratic means. 13
 THE PLOT
 The story takes place in an unspecified city in a distant
future. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman whose job
is to burn down houses in which books have been discovered.

 Montag takes great joy in his work until, after leaving the
fire department one day, he meets Clarisse, a cheerful free-
spirited teenager who loves life and nature and has an
open curious mind: their brief friendship spark’s Montag’s
awakening.

 Later, when the firemen are sent

to burn down the house of an
elderly lady, who chooses to die
with her books, Montag starts to
have doubts about his mission… 14
 MAIN CHARACTERS (1)
1. Guy Montag is by no means a real hero:
clumsy and confused, misguided and often
frustrated, he acts rashly and is too easily
swayed but he seeks answers to his growing
discontent. This will allow him to experience
an epiphany…
2. Clarisse McClellan, seventeen and crazy, has
an open and curious mind about the world
around her. The questions she
asks Montag impel him toward
a painful but necessary self-
examination which will spur him into action.
3. Professor Faber acts as the brain directing
Montag’s body. Cowardly and heroic by turns,
he believes in the integrity of the individual.
16
 MAIN CHARACTERS (2)
4. Mildred Montag represents shallowness
and mediocrity. Completely immersed in an
electronic world, she is totally acquiescent
to a technological chamber of horrors.
Unsurprisingly she is the one who denounces
Montag…
5. Captain Beatty is a complex character, full
of contradictions. He is a book burner with
a vast knowledge of literature and a very
dangerously perceptive manipulator.

6. The Mechanical Hound, an

omnipresent menace, stands
for government control and
manipulation of technology. 17
 KEY THEMES: CENSORSHIP
1. WHY are BOOKS BANNED? For two groups of factors:
a. those that lead to a general lack of interest in reading, as

❑ the popularity of competing forms of entertainment like

television and radio;
❑ a lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has
the time to concentrate;
❑ an overwhelming mass of published material.
b. those that make people hostile towards books, i.e. envy.

❑ People don’t like to feel inferior to those who have read more
than they have.
❑ Special-interest groups and “minorities” object to things in
books that offend them.
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 THE RESULT?
 For Bradbury, books were repositories of
knowledge and ideas: without them we are left blissfully
unaware of what is really happening in the world around us.
“Without libraries what have we?
We have no past and no future.”

 Censorship leaves us with an inadequate and distorted

picture of reality: thus we can be easily manipulated
and ultimately deprived of our freedom:
“It's not books you need, it's some of the
things that once were in books… [We need]
the right to carry out actions based on
what we learn [ from books]. . . ." 19
 KEY THEMES: TECHNOLOGY
2. TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION represents the central
source of society’s problems: it is seen as inherently
a. anesthetizing, since new forms of media, like television
and in-ear radios have a mesmerizing, immersive effect;

b. destructive:

❑ the automobile encourages fast, reckless driving and result

in many fatal accidents;
❑ the Mechanical Hound, a metal contraption designed to
track down and kill lawbreakers, is easy to
manipulate to nefarious ends;
❑ the atomic bomb is an ever-present threat
maintaining an atmosphere of anxiety. 20
 OTHER THEMES
3. IGNORANCE vs KNOWLEDGE: the fire-
man's responsibility is to burn those “treacherous weapons”,
books, and therefore destroy knowledge. Through these
actions, ignorance is promoted, to maintain the sameness
of society in the name of a life of instant pleasure.
❑ But what does true happiness consist of? Is ignorance bliss,
or do knowledge and learning provide true happiness?

4. LIFE vs DEATH: many people die in the novel and the

commonality of suicide attempts and saves blurs the line
between life and death in this futuristic society. Montag,
though, survives…
❑ What saves him? His interest in knowledge and his dedication
to a new and better society. 21
 SYMBOLS (1)
 The key symbol is fire.
 At the beginning of the book, it symbolizes
the pleasure of destruction. It’s an emblem of danger and a
mark of artistry.
 By the end of the novel, however, it turns into a symbol for life,
becoming one with the sun:
“And what lights the sun? Its own fire.
And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning.”
Burning no longer destroys. Instead, the perpetual fire of the
sun keeps the world alive.

 Blood symbolizes people’s instincts and primal

urges. Emotions, for example, are described as
circulating through a person’s body, as blood does. 22
 SYMBOLS (2)
 The Electric-Eyed Snake.
 It’s the machine used to replace Mildred’s poisoned blood
with fresh blood after her overdose of sleeping pills and it
represents the removal of the misery and self-hatred
she possesses, replacing it with complacency and delusion.
 This is ultimately what the authorities want from people:
complete and unchallenged acceptance of the status quo.

 The Phoenix.
After the bombing of the city, humanity is compared
to a phoenix that burns itself up and then rises out
of its ashes over and over again. It’s the symbol of the
cyclical nature of history and the rebirth of man-
kind as well as of Montag’s spiritual resurrection. 23
 STYLE & TONE
 The style of the book is lyrical and descriptive: it makes
frequent use of similes, metaphors, and personification.

 The tone of Fahrenheit 451 is intense and gloomy given by

 the apocalyptic atmosphere that hangs over the city,
constantly threatening nuclear war;
 the totalitarian policies which are applied in Montag’s
society to punish citizens who break society's rules;
 extreme violence both in the real world and on TV:
when the Mechanical Hound is sent after Montag the
chase is broadcast on live television, concluding with
the dramatic capture and execution of an innocent
lookalike. 24
 A DYSTOPIAN NOVEL?
YES…
 If we compare Fahrenheit 451 with A. Huxley’s Brave
New World or G. Orwell’s 1984 we find many points
of SIMILARITY: all three authors imagine
1. a technocratic social order accomplished through the
suppression of books — that is, through censorship;
2. a social order maintained through oppression and
regimentation and by the complete effacement of
the individual;
3. a populace distracted by the pursuit of images,
which has the effect of creating politically
enervated individuals.
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 … and NO!
 In CONTRAST to dystopian novels, though, Bradbury
1. does not focus on a ruling elite;

2. does not portray a higher society;

3. does not despair.

 While Huxley shows a cynical view of the intellectual &

Orwell reveals his despair at the British working-class
political consciousness, Bradbury’s work reflects
 the author’s inherent (and very American!) optimism;
 his trust in the virtue of the individual despite the
inherently corrupt nature of government.
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 BRADBURY’S LEGACY (1)
 Bradbury’s most valuable contributions to humanity
are the warnings he gave us: he was worried about

1. the threat of mass media to reading;

2. the bombardment of digital sensations

that could substitute for critical thinking;

3. the loss of our memory.

WHAT has ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

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 MASS MEDIA & READING
 Thanks to research from
Global English Editing
we have some really
interesting information
about reading habits
around the world.

 This infograph refers to

2018 and tells us about
what is happening in
Europe.

 Take a look at Italy…

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 EMOJIS & LANGUAGE
 Today it seems that half the words online have been
replaced with emojis.

 Flexible and immediate,

they substitute words,
thoughts, emotions…
BUT
the more we erode
language, the more
we erode complex
thought and the easier
we are to control.
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 FAKE NEWS & MEMORY
 Today we have designated Google and our social-
media accounts as the guardians of our memories,
emotions, dreams and facts.

 As the virtual world has become more dominant and

tech companies have consolidated their power the rise
of “alternative facts”
and of “post-truth” has
become a grim reality.

 Fake news is doing

serious harm all over
the world…
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https://www.facebook.com/QuintFactCheck/videos/the-real-damage-of-fake-news-meet-the-victims-of-disinformation/462763354399715/
 BRADBURY’S LEGACY (2)
 To think like Bradbury is to dream and to be aware of
possibilities—the good, the bad, and the unknown.

 The questions his work raised are vital ones:

 what lies ahead and how can we best prepare for it?

 how can we protect freedom?

 how can we all start believing that anything is possible?

We need to keep asking these same questions

in order to make our world a better and safer place!
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