Ahmad Malik
Mr. Saad
English I HP
19 December 2014 Separation
“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it”(Malcolm X). The right to act, speak, talk and be given information should never be retained from any sole being. However, in Anthem and Fahrenheit 451 these rights are contained by the government to change the opinion of the individuals before they have the knowledge to oppose. Anthem talks about Equality 72521 living in a world which is total equality/ total collectivism. Fahrenheit 451 discusses the developing Montag through his journey going in a world where people are onesided, where they don’t wait to understand or inquisize what is happening. In both these books, people are permitted to act against the government. Montag and Equality 72521 understand this fact and attempt to rid them of this thought and enact change. Individualism is lost due to censorship and technology.
Themes in these books can be interpreted similarly, in the way being, they have society portrayed as losing their singularity. Ray Bradbury displays the theme censorship and loss of social interaction in his novel, Fahrenheit 451. Society has become less and less intelligent, as technology advances, and the government begins to sensor more and more, people give into more mindless thoughts, the government stuffs them will senseless information, ultimately dumbingdown the population. Anthem by Ayn Rand exhibits Equality 72521, as he expeditions
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through a collectivist society he has grown up in. There, he finds himself not obeying the laws of government, and eventually thinking about himself rather than of his “brothers” and his other gangs. Ultimately, he attempts to show his seniors of his invention, but they do not accept. He escapes and finds himself in a home from the Unmentionable Times, and begins reading from the books stored within, ultimately, he realizes the way life should be lived, through individualism.
The technologies in these books are widely apart. Within Anthem, technology is much more of the stone age, even though it is set in years after us, the society we know today has evaporated, and with it, technology also. “All the great modern inventions come from the Home of the Scholars, such as the newest one, which we found only a hundred years ago, of how to make candles from wax and string,” (24). Instead of advancing in time, the society in Anthem has been set back thousands of years to Cavemen times, possibly because they were ignorant against the past, the Unmentionable Times, and have even erased the words of individualism. On the other side, however, we see Fahrenheit 451, with its technology is remarkably advance.
Technology has become an everyday necessity, as we see families refer to their parlor T.V. as
“families”. Due to technology being so advance, society suffers as they are brainwashed with mindless information, and grow civil as they have wasted time on their parlor “families” rather than real life social interactions. It is quite to make the conclusion that the technology in
Fahrenheit 451 is far greater and far more advance than our time, let alone the time Anthem is placed in. We can also make the assumption of Anthem’s “Unmentionable Times” stemming from the Fahrenheit 451 era.
These authors come from alike backgrounds. They can
