What Is Censorship In Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was about censorship and how it can go too far in society resulting in no different opinions, and zombie like people who do not think critically. It was written in the 1950s and published in 1953. The book had some vulgar language and depictions of the Bible being destroyed in it. These words and depictions resulted in it getting censored or even banned by several schools. These challenges primarily occurred due to people being offended by the book’s content. This censorship is considered justified by some and outrageous by others. The novel’s censorship is justified in only environments where people are not mature enough to deal with the vulgar language; otherwise, is not acceptable due to breaches of the first …show more content…
When deciding if a book should be banned, another factor that must be analyzed is the content and themes of a novel. The content should be weighed against the ban allegations and if the content’s importance is deemed to overshadow the offensive portions of a novel then it should be kept in the school system. Fahrenheit 451’s themes of government censorship and freedom of information is not only deep, but it is critical for American citizens to understand, especially due to their rights and the amendments. These critical themes outweigh a small portion of people being offended. The overall theme of this book is critical because as the government and society censors more information to keep from offending people, society is slowly becoming more and more fragile. The book’s theme could show people that censorship is not going to help society and that it is only crippling it. Parallels from the book to history display how this theme is not superficial and is something that everyone should be aware of. An example of these parallels being the burning of books in the story being related to how in World War II the Nazis burned many books and tried to censor information that the government did not support. Another connection to history was how many communists were being found and arrested in the mid 1900’s due to the cold war starting. So in America the government would try to censor communists and arrest them at any given opportunity in order to prevent the spread of communism in the United States. The censorship of communistic ideals and communists was technically elimination of freedom of speech. Bradbury was illuminating how society could end up if the government continues to censor things and how this could ultimately result in people leading shallow and ignorant lives. These connections could