Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury is a story about a society where books are censored, people are equally unintelligent, and there’s those few who strive for intellectual freedom. There’s more much than the simple theme of censorship in this book however, Fahrenheit 451’s symbol of the Phoenix may be interpreted to be society. Any fight for what you want, anywhere results in the loss of something in order to gain something. In this story, we at the end see that the city is bombed to ashes, thereafter a survivor, an intellectual freedom seeker describes the city to be a phoenix; leaving us to infer that it’s just like humans have lived, constantly needing to rebuild ourselves from our downfalls just as a Phoenix rebuilds itself from ashes.

Censorship is supposedly done for the good of the people. Such as today, we see obscene material censored from our public in television. We can easily brainstorm numerous reasons for why it's appropriate to maintain this procedure, it promotes the decency in people or at least, that is what we see. However, just because something is censored doesn't mean it's done for all the right reasons. Just as there are good consequences for censorship, we may see negative outcomes. In Fahrenheit 451, we read plenty of negative outcomes. It led to the illegal behavior of Guy Montag into pursuing books, going against his job's purpose and murdering his boss.

It is controversial, censorship may have it's pros and cons, depending on the situation. For example, in another story, " Oedipus Rex," the main character finds his downfall in his story after he is barred from knowing the truth about his life and past as a result of a prophecy. Oedipus's parents gave him away to another kingdom in order to avoid him fulfilling the fate of killing his own father and marrying his own mother, without his awareness of this fate or deal, he was censored from the truth and fulfilled the prophecy anyway. Censoring in this story caused him to downfall