Intimidation In Fahrenheit 451

Thesis: The novel, “Fahrenheit 451” written by Ray Bradbury, justifies how various circumstances can either silence or motivate individuals who are capable of making change.

Two characters in the story, Professor Faber and Captain Beatty, both let fear and intimidation cause them to stay silent and be bystanders. Faber, a former professor who was forced out of his job, watched the world fall apart all his life and had no choice but do nothing: “I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting …show more content…
Since he is one of the few left, wanting to make change, there is a little chance that he would be brave enough and successful at confronting the government. Faber regrets waiting so long in fear to take action on the problems in the country: “I feel I’m doing what I should’ve done a lifetime ago” (125). The strict laws cause people to fear the consequences of breaking them, like getting hunted by a mechanical police hound, therefore, Faber knows that he will lose a lot more than just his job if he turns against the government. The authoritative system causes people to be dumbed down which makes the intellectuals like Faber the helpless minority. Contrarily, Captain Beatty, the chief fireman of the city, unhappily burns with the other firemen in order to hide his attraction towards them: “Beatty had wanted to die. He had just stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, needling” (116). Beatty feels as he is an outcast for being fascinated with books so instead of speaking up about it, he …show more content…
The low security and environment away from the city creates a sense of freedom for the homeless individuals: “They say there’s lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. There aren’t many of them, and I guess the government’s never considered them a great enough danger to go in and track them down” (126). Being an outcast in the country is safer than being in the city, therefore these bright individuals can bring up a plan in a peaceful environment. Their different methods of saving books, for example memorizing whole sections of them, prevents officials from thinking suspicious of them and figuring out what they are up to. No one from the cities really cares about the homeless: “We are model citizens, in out own special way; we walk the old tracks, we lie in the hills at night, and the city people let us be” (145). Since there is little to no law enforcement outsold of the city, the old men can figure out ways to find a way to obtain the knowledge from the last few books left without all the distractions in the city, like the loud advertisements and big crowds. The government assume that the whole population has been deprived of competence, but actually the homeless is saving these … and anticipating to

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