Kayeli Rekoske

Salamanders of the Night

Society seems like an illusion. Totalitarianism is the governmental system. What the patrons are told and taught becomes the reality they create in their minds. Censorship has completely taken over the society. One's knowledge from history is swiped away from existence. Government hides all of the past history, and creates this new present day history, people are led to believe. In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury tells how society completely relies on technology, how the government makes people ignorant of what is really out amongst the world.

Isolation, in Fahrenheit 451, begins in simple house holds. House hold appliances, seem to replace both thoughts and activities of every day life. One person may listen to a “little sea shell, three thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music coming in” (12). A simple ear piece is now a radio for a persons entertainment. Entertainment does not just stop at an ear piece, a T.V. can consume an entire wall. People call these the Parlors, and they can have as many of them as desired. Shows coming from the screens can talk to a person reading a script, as if that person were part of the show being presented. Many of the shows being watched are demented, one of which: “three white clowns chopped off each others limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter” (94). Colors and sound surround the people, flooding their minds with meaningless thoughts, distracting them from an outside society, and giving them their own sense of happiness . Where there are appliances filling minds, there are appliances filling their stomachs. As one would be sitting at a table: “ toast popped out of a silver toaster, was seized by a spidery metal hand that drenched it with melted butter” (18). With this piece of technology it completely proves that the people in this society are completely lazy. However, laziness does...