Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York, Del Rey Book, 1991. 190.

Welcome to future depicted by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, in which “firemen” come to anyone’s house and burn their books.  You may wonder why society would corrode into such a state, but the reason is ever-present in society.  The story is set in a time after 1990 in a Midwestern City and focuses around Guy Montag, a fireman who is a free-thinking and rebellious type.  During a walk home, he meets Clarisse McClellan, a 16-year old who yearns for the past, and Montag starts to believe in this after his wife commits suicide.  The “doctors” who come clean out her system are unsympathetic, and this throws Montag afoot, who sees the faults in the society’s values of sadism, technological control, and anti-intellectualism.

Ray Bradbury shows the faults in the values of a society that are reminiscent of his own and ours.  Bradbury showcases how wrong these values are via a person vs. society conflict; he shows it through the eyes of Montag, who has seen how utterly wrong these values are.  Also, he shows the dynamic aspects of Montag, who at first, is an ordinary Joe in society, then after seeing the wrongful implications of his society’s values, he changes his own beliefs to the true values that are beneficial to society: book-reading.  I enjoyed this dystopian classic because of how great of a story it is, and also, I was quite astonished on how many similarities this story and our modern day world.  Frankly, I would recommend this book to anyone who yearns for some values of the past.