A Study of the Allusions in Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
Date:
1970
On
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Author:
Peter Sisarios
From:
Fahrenheit 451
, Bloom's Guides.
But if we look
more closely at the novel, noting specifically the literary and Biblical allusions, we see a deeper
message in the novel than simply the warning that our society is headed for intellectual stagnation. The literary
allusions are used to underscore the emptiness of the twenty-fourth century, and the Biblical allusions point subtly
toward a solution to help us out of our intellectual "Dark Age." Bradbury seems to be saying that the nature of life is
cyclical and we are currently at the bottom of an intellectual cycle. We must have faith
and blindly hope for an
upward swing of the cycle. This concept of the natural cycle is most explicitly stated by Bradbury through the
character of Granger:
And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again,
the people will be called in, one by
one, to recite what they know, and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the
whole thing over again.
The major metaphor in the novel, which supports the idea of the natural cycle,
is the allusion to the Phoenix, the
mythical bird of ancient Egypt that periodically burned itself to death and resurrected from its own ashes to a
restored youth. Through the persona of Granger, Bradbury expresses the hope that mankind might use his intellect
and his knowledge of his own intellectual and physical destruction to keep from going through
endless cycles of
disintegration and rebirth.
This image of the Phoenix is used in the novel in association with the minor character Captain Beatty, Montag's
superior. As an officer, Beatty has knowledge of what civilization was like before the contemporary society of the
novel. In an attempt to satisfy Guy's curiosity and hopefully to quell any further questioning,
Beatty relates to Guy
how the twentieth century began to decline intellectually, slowly reaching the point in future centuries of banning
books, schools stopped teaching students to think or to question and crammed them with factual data in lieu of an
education. Psychological hedonism became the most positive virtue; all questioners and thinkers were eliminated. It
is crucial that Beatty wears the sign of the Phoenix on his hat and rides in a "Phoenix car." He has great knowledge
of the past yet ironically and tragically does not know how to
use his knowledge, treating it only as historical
curiosity. He is interested only in keeping that status quo of uninterrupted happiness and freedom from worry. He
imparts his knowledge only to firemen who are going through the inevitable questioning he feels all firemen
experience. He tells Guy that fiction only depicts an imaginary world, and all great ideas are controversial and
debatable; books then are too indefinite. Appropriately, Beatty is burned to death, and his death by fire symbolically
illustrates the rebirth that is associated with his Phoenix sign. When
Guy kills Beatty, he is forced to run off and
joins Granger; this action is for Guy a rebirth to a new intellectual life.
Bradbury employs several specific literary quotations to illustrate the shallowness of Guy's world. By using
references to literature, Bradbury carries through a basic irony in the book: he is using books to
underscore his ideas
about a world in which great books themselves have been banned.
After Beatty has given Guy a capsule history of how the world reached the anti-intellectual depths of the twenty-
fourth century, Guy goes to a book he has concealed but has not yet had the courage to read. He reads several pages;
then Bradbury has him quote the following passage:
It is computed, that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their
eggs at the smaller end.
The quotation is from the first book of Swift's