Fahrenheit 451 - Techniques.

As I read through the book, I noticed quite a bit of suspense that made me want to keep reading. Another reason that people today keep reading it is because the setting is very close to what we might imagine our future to be. A look into a possible future is a very good reason to keep reading a book. It interests us because many of us spend our lives staring at a screen. It puts fear into our minds that this could actually happen, so reading through it, we want to see how it all ends.

When Montag first meets Clarisse, he starts to become like her. He starts paying attention to the things she talks to him about (Bradbury 28) and starts to think about the books he burns (Bradbury 33). The fireman side and the intellectual side cannot co-exist, and he starts to struggle with it himself (Bradbury 24). There is suspense in wondering which of the two will end up being who Montag is. Eventually the thinking side wins out, and that puts him in conflict with a society that is very dangerous and has no problem killing those who do not fit in. For example, the firemen were willing and ready to burn a woman alive for owning books before she lit herself on fire (Bradbury 38). After he becomes different, the suspense in the book drifts to whether or not Montag will get away safely.

Another likely reason that people get hooked to reading this book is that the future Bradbury writes about seems scarily possible, especially in today's world. The way everything has to be done with quickly and how people spend entirely too much time in front of a television is fairly close to daily life in the story. So many people in this world say they do not like to read, and that they only read when they absolutely have to. It is just plain sad. It really makes me doubt the human race nowadays. An unfortunately large amount of people  these days spend dangerous amounts of time in front of a television or computer screen. Things like that make Bradbury’s future seem uncomfortably plausible, and make the reader more curious about it. Part of me wonders how people interpretted the book back in the early days of its existance. Did they realize how much Bradbury foreshadowed the near future?

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Print.