Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut: A Pleasure to Burn

Anybody with a high school diploma has probably, by now, heard the famous line.

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

So opens Bradbury his novel about the condemnation of books and the destruction of ideas. Its protagonist, Guy Montag, a firefighter with a dry home life, no children, a distant wife. Montag’s job is to burn everything, then “burn the ashes” so that nothing is left behind.

In Fahrenheit-451 the very act of reading is detrimental to society. It causes people to think, to question the reality that the government has handed them. Instead, media is the forefront of life. People are being fed via four-wall TV, the sound blasted into their brains. Conformity is the only way to survive.

The very same is translated into other dystopian worlds. A prime example of this is George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984. In the novel, the reader is presented with a similar idea. The fact that ideas themselves are detrimental to society because it causes them to question the very fabric of government.

My copy of Fahrenheit-451, the 60th anniversary edition edited in 2013, includes a section toward the back of the book which includes a bunch of essays regarding the creation of the book and its impact on society. One of the essays, written by Adrian Mitchell, draws a parable between other works of dystopian fiction and the novel. He states:

“Wells educated science fiction, but left it skinny and uncertain, Orwell gave it strength and now Bradbury employs it to carry his fears.”

It is easy to also draw similar conclusions about other books in the dystopian genre. Guy Montag is just another Winston Smith, another Kilgore Trout. It paints and repaints the themes we so commonly see in other books of the genre: fear, surveillance, ignorance, blindness…I could go on.