Fahrenheit 451 Notes 3

Pages 48 – 68

49 – “Will you turn the parlor off?” – “That’s my family”

51 – “You ever seen a burnt house:? I smolders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of life.

God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night.”

52 – “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.”

“But that was another Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met.”

54 – Beatty’s lectures about history because every fireman goes through this – (wants to read)

started with the Civil War

· technology and overcrowding

· 20^th C speeds up: condensations, digests, tabloids, the snap ending

· novels abridged into two minute book columns to 12 line dictionary definitions

55

· “whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

· “Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid air, all vanishes!”

· “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignore.”

57

· “More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh?”

· don’t want to offend anyone, everything is spineless, “dishwater” “No wonder books stopped selling”

58

· It didn’t come from top down, no censorship at first, people naturally stopped buying books

· “the word ‘intellectual’ became a swear word”

· “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are ahppy, for there are no mountains to make them cover, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. . . Who know who might be the target of the well-read man?”

59

· firemen—“custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges, and executors”

· “Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it.”

· Start kindergarten so soon after birth (to brainwash essentially)

60 –

· Clarisse: “Didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why”

61

· “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.”

· Make them think they’re thinking

· “I know I’ve tried it” Beatty

· 62 – “I’ve had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe”

This history sounds terrible, but Beatty is proud of this history—why?

Beatty knows that Montag has a book—perceptive

65 – Montag know he’s not happy, is Mildred happy? Or does she just think she is? “I am and proud of it!”

Shows Mildred the books, she freaks. Starts reading 68- reads the line from Gulliver’s Travels, explain meaning. It is meaningless if you don’t know the history, you have to think