Hey everyone, I need some help
If someone could lists some examples of alienation or isolation in the Novel Fahrenheit 451 you would make my day!
i need them to write an essay but i am having some problems getting them,
thanks alot.

Each primary character is clearly alienated or isolated in some manner or another- Montag, Clarrise, Mildred, and Beatty as well. The key to your answering the essay question can be found within the pages of the book, of course! The evidence of these themes present themselves in the first three pages of the novel and unfold right up to the book's closing scene (the book people).

Think - society, substances, peer pressure, (il)literacy, status quo ("I hate the Roman named..."), technology, and cynicism. To whom of the aforementioned do these apply?

Also, get a copy of "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (and a critique of its meaning) and make a parallel to what is happening in (the society of) F451.

[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 03-20-2002).]

Thanks for mentioning "Dover Beach." Two things I couldn't believe: that the movie changed Montag's reading--to an excerpt from "David Copperfield," if my guess is correct--and that the poem is as old as it is. Until ten or twelve years ago I seriously thought the poet was bummed about the bombing of Britain in WWII. Then come to find out it was written in 1880-something! It is so strikingly modern it is hard to place it in the flowering of the Victorian era, so to speak, but so it is. In the movie of "Gone with the Wind," Melanie's reading of "Les Miserables" is changed to "David Copperfield." Conspiracy?

[This message has been edited by dandelion (edited 03-21-2002).]

Bradbury's (prophetic) point in F451 is that technology, modern 'conveniences' and superficial pleasures - when they become so central to our lives - prevent us making any sort of real connection with others (thus the alienation).

Dover Beach-1867
by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
to lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash at night."

(Final stanza, Dover Beach ref. in F451: Montag to Mildred's "friends")
This reflects Montag's intense dilemma as he faces his very uncertain furure. The metamorphosis of Mr. Bradbury's protagonist is as great as it gets in the literary world.

I especially like Mr. Bradbury's inclusion of the lines from Ecclesiastes ("For everything there is a time...") and Revelations (The tree of life...yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations!!)as Guy Montag is walking toward the city at the novel's very end!!

Talk about alienation and isolation!

[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 03-21-2002).]

quote:

Originally posted by crumley:
Bradbury's (prophetic) point in F451 is that technology, modern 'conveniences' and superficial pleasures - when they become so central to our lives - prevent us making any sort of real connection with others (thus the alienation).

Amen!!
I feel that people were not in touch with themselves and just absorb the media (controlled by the government) as their own thoughts. (not really but they were like brainwashed)