Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about censorship and how the government implemented it. Reading this book made me think of a recent comparison to many of the world's Arab countries. As I have heard in many reports, TVs and radios and other objects we take for granted are forbidden to be owned by those not closely associated with the country's government. If these rules are broken, many of the countries will go ahead and torture the felons to death.
The book begins with the main character, Guy Montag, returning from his not so common firefighter duties. Guy is a fireman who starts and fuels fires to burn houses and all of their contents to ashes. Why does he do it? In his society, anyone who has books in their possession will have all of their property burned. Later, we find out that the offense was reading the books, not just having them. Later that night, Guy is rounding a usual corner on a usual night, but somehow it feels very different than it usually does to go around that corner. He meets a young 17-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan. Clarisse is described as being a bit insane. When Guy meets her, he finds out that she is his new neighbor. She lives with her uncle, mother and father in an apartment across the street from Guy's house. Guy has a wife named Mildred with whom he lives. Mildred lives the kind of life that the government wants all of their citizens to live. She watches lots of TV because the government wanted people to not have to think while getting a form of entertainment. This was one of the reasons they outlawed book reading. TV was a form of mindless entertainment. Throughout the book, Mildred is a quiet character except for the times when Guy brings up any sort of topic related to books. She seems to have been quite an avid book reader before the ban on reading books was put into place. Mildred is the one who turns Guy in for reading books. This displays that a marital relationship is not as we see one today but is one where a wife would turn her husband in for a crime.
