After finishing this book, all I can really conclude about its tone is that it is dark and considerably gloomy. It's not exactly a really happy topic, you know, the whole burning of all knowledge thing. Nonetheless, the gloominess is somewhat necessary. Ray Bradbury wanted everyone to realize how horrible the world would be if there were no books or the personal thoughts and opinions within their pages. If he wrote a happy or light hearted tale about the same events in this novel, the readers would not be able to take the decline of individuality seriously.
Even though it is gloomy, it is more than that. There is also alot of fear and tension found within the writing. “The perspiration gathered with the silence and the subaudible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode (Bradbury 95-96).” I think the sentences feel so tense because they are building toward something about to happen. Just a few pages later: “The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting (Bradbury 99).” I think this sounds tense because of all the references to the heat.
I have found that the tone of this novel, where gloomy and tense, is actually really sad. I noticed the sadness especially when Bradbury was talking about Montag or Mildred. Of course, the decline of love in a "family" is not exactly happy. “He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out (Bradbury 12).” That sentence is just...really sad. The fact that he could no longer smile, because he realized there was no happiness in his life. I can imagine the depression was coursing through him like liquid lead in his veins. Even though the novel is very sad and depressing, it makes the readers understand the reality of the entire situation. Without personal thought or expression, where would the world be?
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Print.
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