the THEME

The theme of this book is,

Censorship is an idea and factor leads to laziness, apathy, a meaningless world, and destruction of books.

Ray Bradbury has made book burning or the banning of books represent the censorship occuring in books in the real world. He was definitely against the blackout and restriction because he thought the world would end up like the world in Fahrenheit 451.

There were three main reasons for the result of censorship. It was the indifference in reading books, the want of full happiness, and how some people hated books.

In this whole story, the society, world, and people do not even care about books. This was mostly due to the strong, new interest towards technology, entertainment, and speed. Everyone loved the 'parlor' and the Seashell radios. Montag's wife, Mildred, especially loveddd them; people were just totally addicted! Since those new things were so interesting and fun, nobody spent time reading and caring for them. Also, everthing was done so fast, especially the cars. In that high speed, nobody would take slow time reading, concentrating and thinking.

Secondly, the world wanted full happiness. For that bliss, the world would not want to ponder and dig through the complications of books. It was just too stressful, worrying, and overwhelming to think about it. So to get rid of that, the government banned books, or in the real world, censored them.

Thirdly, before the banning of books, it was told once in the novel that some people were offended by books. They did not like the opinions and thoughts of novels.

In the book, these seemed like the factors that led to book banning. Similarly with the same reasons in the real world, Bradbury has seen that people were changing and did not want to think. So they started to censor, censor, and censor the precious books. This censoring hides, tears out, and totally takes parts out of the book. Therefore, this action will eventually lead to the loss of truth and meaning of books. Burning books represents this censoring because censoring is similar to destroying and getting rid of books.

So, like what happened in the story censoring will make the world lazy, apathy, meaningless, and unhappy. Everyone was just stuck onto the technology and thought that they were happy, but actually, in truth, none of them were.

This theme is important to teenagers in the present world. Nowadays, teens do not want to think deep but to just read quickly. Everyone wants to be happy and not spend time reading the long books. They just want to read condensed and censored books; it's so much easier! And teens especially, are getting more and more addicted to technology, not novels. So this theme is especially significant to teens because they (we) are gradually getting more and more like the people and society in Fahrenheit 451, that should be avoided.