The conflict that I am going to write about is Montag vs the government. Montag keeps books that he is supposed to burn and therefore breaks the laws and the government sends out a search party complete with a new Mechanical Hound to find and kill him. The cause of the conflict is Montag not following the law and reading books. The thing that set him off was Clarisse asking if he was happy (Bradbury 10) and Montag realizing that he wasn't happy.
The gain of the conflict is Montag realizing that he was ignorant and only knew what other people had told him was correct. He started to act spontaneous (reading poetry to Mildred and her friends [Bradbury 100]) with the new knowledge that he possessed. Also Montag realized that maybe he didn't love his wife like he previously had thought. That realization won't have happened if Montag didn't pick up that book because of Clarisse's thought provoking ideas.
The loss of the conflict is Montag losing his self-control. He sets Black's house on fire (Bradbury 130) and kills Beatty (Bradbury 119). The knowledge that Montag gained caused him to overload and he made lots of wrong choices. His hands also had a mind of their own (Bradbury 88) which tells that his subconscious was still brainwashed and Montag hadn't convinced his whole mind that the books are good and reading is a powerful thing.
The government, while they didn't originally come up with the idea to stop reading books (Bradbury 183), they did organize the burning of books and censoring information. They started brainwashing the citizens so they don't have to actually comprehend or draw deep meaning from anything. No one observed anything anymore. Everything they needed to know was told through the long billboards or through their jobs. Their entertainment was televisions on all four walls that immersed them into the show. The show was very simpleton and didn't have a complex plot, characters, or anything. They don't want people to think to hard, after all. Also observation skills were gone. Clarisse pointed it out when she told a story about her uncle going to jail because he went 40 miles per hour on a highway so he could watch the flowers and grass (Bradbury 9).
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment