Fahrenheit 451

The Game of Life

Author's Note: I finished reading Fahrenheit 451; there were so many things that I learned from it and one thing stuck out a lot to me.  This piece is about how life is like a video game.  You may be wondering how I thought about this book that way.  I went to see an adorable cartoon movie called, Wreck it Ralph, with my little sister and the same message came across in the movie.  In this piece I will try to use the four different sentence structures, reversed patterns, metaphors, crisscrossing patterns, and climatic patterns.

"There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms."  You are hoping for some miracle like a balloon, a level up, a cloud, but nothing comes.  The computer geniuses aren't on your side today.  Seeing your pixilated avatar fall, you know what will happen next.  Back to square one.  Wrapping your fingers around the joystick, you begin to develop a plan, a hero's plan -- one with sacrifice, maybe even great sacrifice.  Anything you can do to achieve your goal, you will do.  Noble heroes have noble sacrifices.

Ready…Set…Go!  This is it, if you beat this level, your on the winners board.  At first, you can play this game in your sleep.  Pixilated Pete is jumping, running, and grabbing at the prize boxes when evil green monsters, or Beattys as I like to call, start attacking in their mob.  Beatty is one person that changes all the feeble followers into unknowledgeable copies of himself.  This is unfair, you against everyone else, but then you see an opening.  You dive through and off you are, yet again. 

Everything is going as you planned until, you see something.  In the corner of your screen you see another gamer out there in a tough spot.  The little character is cornered by the green monsters.  All they want is for that puny player to fall under their control.  You can help them, but will you?  This is all you ever wanted -- to get a gold metal and get on the winners board.  Are you really going to let that all go just to help someone else get up there.  Winners in this game are called heroes, but are they really?  After a little bit of thinking, you do what you know is morally right.  Jumping down to their brick, you lend them a hand and fight off the monsters as they escape.  The tiny character won, but you were the hero.

Heroes do what is overall right.  Not for the good of themselves, what they do is.  They show their nobleness, help their people, and do what others don't have the courage and bravery to do.  These people would sacrifice themselves to help others.  These people notice things that others don't see.  These people have the strength to do what is write, even if it pains them.  Both Montag, for standing up against the firemen and noticing that burning books was a terrible act that they have done, and Ralph, for helping someone he barely knew and restoring life to the way it should be, are both heroes.  Those two stories were so diverse, but they carried a great message.   You don't have to be a winner to be a hero.

Terrors of Technology

Author's Note: I haven't written anything for Fahrenheit 451 in a while and since I just finished part two, I thought it would be the perfect time.  In this piece I will try to create a sentence that has more than forty words.  I will also try to use alliteration, litotes, and metaphors.  This piece is about my opinion and Ray Bradbury's opinion on technology.

Click!  The film slowly develops and slips through the slot revealing your favorite city park, but now you pass this park that slowly transformed into a major freeway where the cars zoom by and miss the beautiful land that used to belong here.  Now, the world is faster and it will continue progress.  We long for the rides of scenic routes; all those simple joys in life are replaced by new technology.  Is all this necessary technology necessary or even helping us positively?  Some can invade privacy.  Some can make us forget our humanity.   Some can even control us.  Technology can be a dangerous thing.  Ray Bradbury feared some of our technological advancements we have today.

There are so many new inventions our world has to offer.  Just think, we used to have tiny little screens with an enormous sized box behind it as a television.  In Montag's home they have TVs the size of walls.  Not only are they huge, his wife, Mildred, can interact with them, too; to Guy, it's an invasion of his privacy.  He can see them and they can see him.  Technology like their two way screen is a little uncomfortable.

The fact that the people in his television can see him is one thing, but the fact that Mildred talks to them is a whole new story.  Mildred pays attention to the people on her TV more than her own husband.  To her, this technology is her world.  She is blind to reality; she has lost her humanity.  What if the rest of the world was like her -- considering people on a show their family, talking to those fake people more than the real people around them?  Hiding away the humanity which we must always hold onto is a result of the things that technology can do.

Technology can also be a commander in the military, controlling.  In the firehouse, the mechanical hound is forced to do what ever it takes to keep there world free of anyone that can cripple their system.  This hound is a tragic symbol of jurisdiction and power.  People like Beatty also take charge of the awful things that must take place to keep their clocks running.  That controlling force is the only way they can keep their generation going.  It's cruel to have to use one machine to govern their world.

Although, our creations do help us most of the time, Bradbury feared some of them.  Some can assist us and some can aggrieve us.  Nonetheless, where would we be without technology?  Video games are technology.  They can only be used for so long until they have to be replaced.  There will always be "what ifs", but sometimes you have to take that first step even if you don't see the whole staircase.

Restoration

Author's Note: In part one of this book, Guy Montag is kind of recovering from the horrible life he's been living.  This little, fictional narrative is going to be about recovery, in other words restoration.  There is a lot of symbolism in this book and I am going to use some things like the salamander to explain by ideas about the meaning of the novel so far.  In this piece I will try to use similes, metaphors, repetitive ending patterns, and hyperboles.

Dead.  His cold eyes melted into your soul like ice cubes on the hot asphalt on a summer day.  He watches the salamander unharmed, untouched by the flames the continue to crackle before him.  How could this be?  The reptile has escaped the destruction, chaos, evil.  There is proof; you can restore yourself from the horrible nightmare that you have lived.

He realized that his entire life had been lived awfully.  You have to wake up from your bad dreams in order to get away from them.  Montag began to put the pieces together.   Then, he began to comprehend that what the firemen did was wrong.  They killed an innocent woman.
"I suddenly realized I didn't like them at all, I didn't like myself any more," he said.
The knowledge that what you did was wrong will slowly put the light back into your eyes.  Reality.  The first step to restoration.


Not only must you stop looking into the fire, you have to look at the world like a water globe.  Water, purity.  Clarisse sees life in this way.  She is in all ways pure, sees everything as completely pure, and changes the most devilish souls into the most pure.  You have to be like Clarisse and see the world in its beauty and not take pity on its flaws.  Although, there are many things in life that you have done that you are not proud of, you can't change the past, you can only shape the future.

With that, you have to start the change.
"Here now," said Montag.  "We'll start over again, at the beginning."
He's starting to find a way out of the fire and away from the hearth. You can't just sit around and wait for life to change its ways, because nobody knows when that will happen or if it will happen at all.  Montag starts to find out why his life is the way it is and goes from there.  Forward, that's where he's going.  Everyone else in their world should be headed in that direction too.  Only one person can start a change.  That person is you.

Blurry.  Blinking a few times, his vision returns.  He sees his life for what it really is, nothing.  His job is to realize what it is, enhance what is pure, and shape it into what it could be.  No one else will change it, so why shouldn't he? Life is like a book; if you don't keep reading, you'll never know what it's about.



Unforgivably Guilty

Author's Note:  I'm reading a book called Fahrenheit 451 and there's a lot of symbolism inside the book.  It takes place in a dystopic world, so you have to pay attentions to a lot of the differences.  In this book they do a lot of things that are terrible but they don't see it the way we do.  In this little prompt I will explain the things that they do wrong using semantic devices and quotes and relation to the text.

Guilt.  The gut wrenching feeling you get when you know what you did was wrong.  If you don't have it, evil.  A broken being that has never felt emotion or listened to their conscious.  It's cruelty.  Montag and Mildred don't see eye to eye.  He is on his path to healing, although Mildred is like everybody else; she knows nothing better than the destruction they brought upon themselves.  

"Aren't you going to ask me about last night?" he said.

"What about it?"

"We burnt a thousand books.  We burnt a woman."

"Well?"

Not only are their lives horrid flashes of wickedness, Mildred is blind -- blind to the evil and insane actions that have taken their place.  Murder is a crime, not something that you can look past.  She is broken; she can't see the horror in a situation like this.  As for Montag, he sees the terrible event he has caused, and he is slowly opening his eyes to the future.  If you don't feel guilt, you don’t feel anything at all.  Their world is a museum of statues without souls to possess them.  There is no magical spark of hope in their eyes.  A bottomless empty pit is what you find when you stare into those black holes. 

They say the eyes are windows to the souls, but when all you see is darkness, you know the fire of hope has gone out.