An introduction to Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an American science fiction writer. While he had an extremely prolific career in short story writing, Bradbury also wrote a number of novels. This includes Fahrenheit 451, a novella about the proliferation of mass media technology in the mid-twentieth century. Bradbury used his fiction to examine the potential social impacts of technology on the human psyche.

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury imagines a society where, not only are people addicted to mass media, but books are illegal, and their possession is punished with mandatory book burning. Bradbury asserts that, not only does this lead to a loss of culture, but also a more general and existential loss of humanity. The characters of the world of Fahrenheit 451 struggle to connect to one another, and cannot make sense of their lives in the absence of using literature to achieve self-expression.

Science fiction & postmodernism

The mid-twentieth century saw the proliferation of science fiction across a number of magazines and other publications. This led to an enormously innovative period within the genre, and the rise of key literary voices, including Philip K. Dick, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury.

While the genre was still largely derided as ‘pulp fiction’ (cheap books without much literary merit), it was enormously popular with the general public, and academic perceptions of science fiction began to change. Ray Bradbury, with his social criticisms and understanding of human nature, was a clearly important figure. His transition from short stories to longer form works such as Fahrenheit 451 cemented this reputation.

Indeed, an IB student could argue that Bradbury was less concerned with the trappings of science fiction than he was with a postmodern critique of American society. Bradbury used the science fiction elements in Fahrenheit 451 to further his criticism that American society was disengaging intellectually, and was uniquely susceptible to authoritarian rule due to this broadening apathy. These themes and criticisms are often at the centre of postmodern literature, and thus it opens up a study of Fahrenheit 451 as a postmodern novella.

IB-level literary analysis

Students aiming to score high on the IB in English Literature must be able to incorporate discussions of literary movements into their analysis, as well as analysis of language, and how the work has been affected by its historical context.

An example of a decent IB-level literary analysis would be as follows:

While the impact of its science fiction elements are most immediately visible to readers in the novella’s alternate history, and fantastical technology such as ‘telescreens’ and the dangerous ‘hounds’, Ray Bradbury’s work is perhaps best understood as postmodernist. Fahrenheit 451 presents a clear critique of American society, and broadly holds a cynical view of the world and humanity, which is in-line with a reader’s expectations of postmodern literature. Indeed, it also displays an attentiveness to intertextuality, another key feature of postmodern literature. Montag tries repeatedly to remember key passages from books he has read (illicitly), and the failure to retain the information is a key component of the novella’s conflict. This engagement with the ideas of postmodern literature suggests that Bradbury was aware of broader literary critiques and movements of the 1950s.

This student exemplar presents a decent understanding of a number of features of postmodern literature, and engages with them relatively well. However, their analysis is notably incomplete. It would be better to see a more thorough analysis of how this impacts a specific moment in Fahrenheit 451, perhaps including a greater degree of language analysis.

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