Social Satire: “trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly”, as defined by Merriam-Webster Online. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury uses social satire in a most direct way to expose censorship today. When Bradbury wrote this book, censorship was just creeping into the lives of humans, and today censorship has built a protective bubble around everything we do. Fahrenheit 451’s satire of censorship is aimed at American media and mind, American society, and our entertainment.
The medium in Bradbury’s book is the epitome of a controlling media. Due to books being burned and forgotten, the government is capable of changing the outcome of history by rewriting it; therefore, history can be whatever the media want it to be. America’s government is autonomous in that they are afforded the same liberties as the free media. If the media get their hands on a certain story, they can change or omit important details that affect the story. The media of our time can censor what they want, and moreover, control the minds of American citizens. In Bradbury’s world, the media is so powerful that they burned books to oppress any uncontrolled thoughts or subliminal messages. As a result, people are then forced to stop reading. Books are condensed into smaller and smaller pieces, removing all “unimportant” information in today’s world, and the general public doesn’t care. Many pieces of literature in our world are now abridged; people can not get the full meaning of these books by reading a much shorter version. In Bradbury’s book, both the media and government were guilty of censoring books to the point of nonexistence; the written word had no substantial meaning. School is described by Clarisse as a place where one can’t think. With our society’s increasing stupidity, how long will it be before our books become burned?
Much of American society today is focused on what we censor, and we are...
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