Fahrenheit 451 Critical Review

Even though Ray Bradbury urged the world to beware of the onslaught of increasingly meaningless media and to preserve morals and ethics through intellectually stimulating content, such as books and deep human relationships, through his book Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, based on the current situation of society today, it seems that the world ironically ignored his warnings. For example, in the realm of reading, an increasing amount of people prefer to read summaries of a book on websites like Shmoop and Sparknotes rather than read the actual books themselves. Replacing such parts of life as reading literature and holding real discussions with limited substitutes like summaries or text conversation proves to strip these areas of life from meaning
First of all, since a summary only provides paraphrased explanations of the events that happened in the story, the student who reads a summary fails to experience the way that the author used words to create a story. For example, Aravind Adiga writes his novel The White Tiger, which details the corrupt rise of a lower caste Indian boy from being a servant to being a private business owner in a big city, in email format addressed to the former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and sprinkles many Hinglish (Indian-English) phrases throughout the story. As a final note, The way in which Balram abhors his social position in his society has such a power to disgust and appaul that could only be evoked through reading his words on the matter (example). All of these things in the book add to the story to create a particular atmosphere (in this case, a very anxious and angry one) and a particular power to the specific words that a person would not ascertain through solely reading a summary of this story. Whereas a certain summary may briefly describe Balram’s desire to achieve “success”, the summary can never truly express his desire to do so as his own monologue describing his abhorrence of his own family’s poverty. Additionally, though a summary may say this story takes place in India, the reader can only fully immerse himself/herself by reading the Hinglish phrases and the descriptions of the surroundings given by the author himself. In this way, whereas a summary may sufficiently give the reader paraphrased descriptions of certain aspects of the story, the reader can only fully understand the story by experiencing the technique of the author’s