Introduction to Fahrenheit 451
33% of American high school graduates never read another book (for pleasure) for the
rest of their lives.
42% of American college graduates never read another book (for pleasure) after college.
80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
There are over 17,000 radio stations and over 2,000 TV stations in America today.
Each day in the U.S., Americans spend on average 4.7 hours watching TV, 3 hours
listening to the radio, and 14 minutes reading magazines.
The projected average number of hours an individual American (who is at least 12 years
old) will spend watching television this year is 1,750.
In a 65-year life, the average American will have spent 9 solid years watching TV.
An average American child will see 20,000 30-second TV commercials each year.
Every day in America, Americans check out 3 million items from the public library
(including movies).
Every day in America, Americans rent 6 million movies.
The percentage of Americans who can name The Three Stooges is 59%.
The percentage of Americans who can name at least three current justices sitting on the
U.S. Supreme Court is only 17%.
According to UNICEF, a billion people will enter the twenty-first century unable to read
a book or sign their names and two-thirds of them are women.
When Ray Bradbury wrote this novel in the basement of the UCLA library on a pay per
half-hour typewriter, TV was in its infancy. In 1945 there were only 10,000 TV sets in all
of America. By 1950, there were 6 million sets. The U.S. population was 150 million
living in 43 million households. Only 9% of these households had a TV. There was just
one TV for every 25 Americans. Currently, the U.S. population is 310 million people
living in 115 million households, and there are 335 million TV sets in the U.S. Today in
our country, TV sets outnumber the people. There is a TV set in 99% of U.S. households,
with an average of three television sets per household, not including computers or handheld viewing devices (such as phones) that can be used to watch TV programs.
In developed countries, the level of functional literacy of an individual is proportional to
his/her income level and risk of committing crime. For example, according to the
National Center for Educational Statistics in the United States:
Over 70% of adults in the U.S. prison system read at or below the fourth grade level.
85% of U.S. juveniles who ‘interface’ with the juvenile court system (not just those who
end up serving time in ‘juvie’ but also those who are accused, tried, etc.) are functionally
illiterate.
Penal institution records show that inmates have only a 16% chance of returning to prison
if they receive literacy help while in prison, as opposed to a 70% chance for those who
receive no such help while in prison. In other words, increasing literacy among prisoners
drastically lowers the chances that those prisoners will commit (and be convicted of)
more crimes after being released from prison.
Illiteracy and crime are closely related. The Department of Justice states, “The link
between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading
failure.”
In the U.S., one child out of every four grows up not knowing how to read.
90% of welfare recipients are high school dropouts.
43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy live below the poverty line, as opposed to
only 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy.
According to BegintoRead.com:
Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the fourth grade will end up either
in jail or on welfare.
Three out of four individuals who receive food stamps read on the two lowest levels of
literacy.
Sixteen to nineteen year old girls at the poverty level and below, with below-average
skills, are six times more likely to have out-of-wedlock children than their reading
counterparts.
Low literacy in the U.S. costs us $73 million per year in terms of direct health care costs.
For example, if someone is unable to read and understand directions for a prescription or
over-the-counter medication, they may take too low or too high of a dose, resulting in
illness and that person may have to go to the ER to get emergency medical care, for
which she or he may or may not be able to pay.
The American Council of Life Insurers reported that 75% of the Fortune 500 companies
provide some level of remedial training for their workers.
Thirty million Americans (14% of American adults) are unable to perform simple and
everyday literacy activities.
The National Center for Education Statistics provides more detail. Literacy is broken
down into three parameters: prose, document, and quantitative (math-related) literacy.
Each parameter has four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. For
prose literacy, for example, a below basic level of literacy means that a person can look at
a short piece of text to get a small piece of uncomplicated information but could not look
at a longer text and make correct inferences about more complex information, while a
person who is below basic in quantitative literacy would be able to do only simple
addition and subtraction and so on. In the U.S., 14% of the adult population is at the
“below basic” level for prose literacy; 12% are at the “below basic” level for document
literacy; and 22% are at the “below basic” level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the
U.S. population is at the ‘proficient’ level in all three areas, able to do things like
compare viewpoints in two editorials, compute and compare the cost per ounce of food
items, or interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity.
A Literacy at Work study, published by the Northeast Institute, found that business losses
attributed to American workers’ basic skill deficiencies run into billions of dollars a year
due to low productivity, errors, and accidents attributed to functional illiteracy.
Sociological research has demonstrated that countries with lower levels of functional
illiteracy among their adult populations (that is, countries with the highest levels of
literacy) tend to be those with the highest levels of scientific literacy among even the
lower-achieving stratum of their young people who are nearing the end of their formal
academic studies. In other words, in the countries with the highest literacy rates, even
their lowest-performing high school seniors still have high scientific literacy.
This suggests that a contributing factor to a society's level of civic literacy is the ability of
schools to ensure students get the functional literacy necessary to comprehend the basic
texts/documents (e.g., the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, texts of various
laws, editorials, newspaper/magazine articles, etc.) associated with competent citizenship.
Since civic literacy is so important, and was so important to Ray Bradbury, and much of
Fahrenheit 451 bemoans the general lack of civic literacy in our society, I have some
civic literacy goals for you with this unit as well as reading literacy goals.
By the time we are done with this unit, I want all of you to have memorized the First
Amendment to the United States Constitution, and to know the names of your two state
senators, the governor of our state, the name and party affiliation of at least one of your
district representatives, and at least five current members of the U.S. Supreme Court, and
the name of the Supreme Court case that recently ruled that money and free speech are
exactly the same thing. These things matter. I also hope that you will watch less
television, spend more time talking to other human beings, reading, writing, being out in
nature, just thinking about things, and so on. Part of that may come about through the
packet on tracking your activities for the next few weeks. Every day, I want for you to
keep track of how much time you spend doing things like watching TV, or reading,
talking to people, and so on, so that you can become more conscious of exactly how
much time you spend doing each kind of thing, and where your time goes. This may lead
to what is called ‘the observer effect.’ As a result of your becoming more cognizant and
aware of how you spend your time each day, you may find yourself spending less time
watching TV and more time reading or talking to people, simply because you will begin
to find yourself becoming self-conscious about how much time you spend doing things
like watching TV. The fact that you have to keep track of and record how you spend your
time, and that I’ll be collecting and viewing that documentation, may result in your
striving to consciously make ‘better’ use of your time so that you come off looking better
and don’t appear to be a lazy couch-potato. I’m perfectly fine with that. I welcome that
observer effect. If you spend less time watching television and more time in nature, and
talking to other people, and reading, writing, drawing, and thinking, that’s fantastic.
Now, as for the basic information you will need to understand the setting, characters, and
plot of Fahrenheit 451, which is the temperature at which paper burns, please take notes
on the following information:
The setting is on this continent in the very-near-future. When Ray Bradbury wrote the
novel in 1953, he thought it would be taking place in the very late twentieth or very early
twenty-first century, so let’s say just a few years from now. There are no references in
the novel to it being the United States of America any more, so we don’t know if the
author envisioned this society as still being part of the U.S., but it takes place in the near
future in the place that is currently the U.S. The book is written in the third person, that
is, the narrator is positioned outside of the events of the book, not a character who
participates in the events within the book. It is also called ‘limited omniscient,’ which
sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it means that as readers we only really get to
know the thoughts and emotions of the protagonist as opposed to the thoughts and
feelings of many characters. So, the point of view is called ‘third-person limited
omniscient.’ We know everything that one character thinks and feels, but we have no
direct access to the thoughts/feelings of any other characters. We are omniscient in that
we can know a person’s thoughts and emotions, but this is limited to just the protagonist.
The main character (protagonist) is Guy Montag, frequently referred to in the book by
just his last name of Montag. He is rarely called Guy. The other main characters would
be Guy’s wife, Mildred, whom he calls Millie, and an ex-professor whom Guy befriends
named Faber, a seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan who is a neighbor of
the Montags, and finally Guy Montag’s boss, Fire Chief Beatty, who is one of the major
antagonists in the book. Clarisse McClellan is only in the book very briefly, but the
impact she has on the protagonist, Guy Montag, is huge; her role is brief, but pivotal.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In this society a fireman is not someone who puts out fires,
since all buildings have been coated in a thin, clear and fireproof plastic material. In this
society, firemen start fires, specifically, to burn books, since owning books has been
outlawed. The symbol of the firemen is a salamander, a mythological representation of
an actual creature that is in reality a lizard. But in the myths about salamanders, they
were seen as fire elementals, creatures who ate fire and lived in fire. Of course in reality
a salamander would burn and die in a fire, but the mythological creature version of
salamanders lived in flames. The firemen also have the number 451 incorporated into
their uniforms because again 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper
catches fire and burns. The plot revolves around the journey that Guy undertakes when
he begins to realize that he is not happy and that his society is sick and dying, and he
begins to dare to steal books that he’s supposed to be burning, and even to read them, to
find out what he’s been destroying his whole career, and to see if there is anything in
books worth knowing after all; he is curious. These risks lead, of course, to
complications in his life, since in this society owning books is illegal; it’s particularly
taboo for a fireman—of all people—to steal and read books. The novel is about this
character’s journey from ignorance to knowledge, from an empty life and familiar despair
to a strange new life of meaning, purpose, hope, and of course, incredible danger.