Brave New World and Farhenheit 451 :: essays research papers

Imagine a world where free will is obsolete. Nobody has any freedom; most people do not even have a yearning for autonomy. The direction the world is heading right now could possibly produce such a world. Both Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, envision this world which lacks liberty. These books, both of which are supposed to be set in the future, have numerous theme similarities throughout them. Of all their common factors, the ones that stand out most would have to be the outlawed reading of books and the theme of the protagonist being a loner or an outcast from society because of his differences in beliefs as opposed to the norm. In the societies of both of these books outlawed reading is a common and almost completely unquestioned law. In Brave New World reading is something that all classes are conditioned against from birth. In the beginning of the novel there is a group of infants who are given bright, attractive books but are exposed to an explosion and a shrieking siren when they reach out for them. This thus prevents them from wanting the books and causes them to scream and shrink away in horror at the mere sight of the books. In reference to the accomplishment of this conditioning, the director said, "Books and loud noises...already in the infant mind these couples are compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has jointed, nature is powerless to put asunder," (Huxley 21-22). We come to learn that the basic reasoning behind this conditioning against reading in Brave New World was because "you couldn't h ave lower-caste people wasting the Community's time over books, and there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes" (Huxley 22). In Fahrenheit 451 the outlawing of book reading is taken to an even greater extent. In this novel the whole purpose of a firefighter isn't to put out fires, rather it is to start fires. The reading of books in their society is completely forbidden and if someone is suspected of even owning a book, the firefighters are dispatched to go to that person's residence and start a fire. They start fires for the sole purpose of destroying books, as illustrated here, "They pumped the cold fluid from the numeraled 451 tanks strapped to their shoulders.