Personal Narrative

Literacy Narrative – Fahrenheit 451 A moment when I as a writer felt an influence towards my ability to be literate was in my tenth grade English class, reading the novel Fahrenheit 451. Never before had I shown such appreciation and willingness to understand for a school assigned book, in truth my interest with school readings had been deteriorating due to the consistency of papers and assignments.. For years any school readings were easy to understand and majority held interesting tales, yet no piece of literature (even outside school) could manage to make me say “I’m buying this book to put on my shelf and read on my own.” Nothing brought “inspiration” or gave examples of “unique” to myself personally, only the basic sentence structures and dialogue for conversation. In short, I didn’t care how literate I was because I never saw anything to imprint on myself. The only novel I would like to own needs to impact both my mind and if successful my own writing. However, each passing page of Fahrenheit 451 managed to give me that inner meaning that I wanted my own writing to radiate.
As a reader I believe any novel you read has the potential to grab hold of your mind and influence or make contact with ones’ thoughts and ideals, even if one doesn’t want to let it. With this mentality I approached Fahrenheit 451 with the standard of anything that happens to be written and land in my hands, analyze everything you can until page 40. The moment I knew the novel already had me in its grip was but page seven, barely past the introduction of any significant characters at all. At page seven the main character, Guy Montag, is being questioned about himself and the world he follows without hesitation by no more than a teenage girl. Simple statements such as how fast he drives and if he looks at the flowers were alien ideas to Montag, he hadn’t been told to pay attention to these things so why would he? Each question caused Montag to look at himself for the first time in a long