FAHRENHEIT 451 ESSAY

Timothy Schoech
Ignorance is bliss. Everyone has had this one phrase spouted at them at one time or
another. Ignorance is bliss. Or is it? In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, ignorance and intellect
play key roles within the plot with ignorance being the more negative of the two. Throughout the
novel, ignorance doesnt always equal bliss as seen when Montag turns to reading books,
Mildred attempts suicide, and with all the people fighting for the knowledge books provide.
From just these three portions of the novel, anyone can see that ignorance isnt always bliss.
First of all, Montag turns to reading books. Books, in this tale, represent knowledge and
all the freedoms and happiness it provides. In the beginning, Guy Montag, the protagonist of
Fahrenheit 451, finds himself as an ignorant fireman burning books to keep the public ignorant.
This quickly changes as he meets a young, free-thinking girl named Clarisse. Clarisse, whos
personality is quite adventurous and easygoing, changes Montags point of view with one
question. Are you happy? she said./ Am I what?he cried. (7) Later that day her simple
question rattles Montag to the bone. He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on
itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing
and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to
himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. (9) Clarisses simple question of whether
Montag felt happy or not deeply wounds him. For so long Montag carries around his ignorance
feeling as if it were bliss. He feels as if he is happy only for him to realize, by the simple
quizitive nature of a young girl, that he is not, in fact, happy. Nevertheless, Montag marches on

attempting to find something to bring him happiness. Finally, something sticks. He took hold of
a straight-backed chair and moved it slowly and steadily into the hall near the front door and
climbed up on it and stood for a moment like a statue on a pedestal, his wife standing under him,
waiting. Then he reached up and pulled back the grill of the air-conditioning system and reached
far back inside to the right and moved still another sliding sheet of metal and took out a book.
Without looking at it he dropped it to the floor. He put his hand back up and took out two books
and moved his hand down and dropped the two books to the floor. Hr kept moving his hand and
dropping books, small ne, fairly large ones, yellow, red, green ones. When he was done, he
looked down upon some twenty books lying at his wifes feet. (62-63) Books stick to Montag
like glue. Despite them being forbidden in this universe, Montag begins a secret collection of
books only to later show them to his wife as shown. Because books represent knowledge, it is
obvious that Montags ignorance isnt bliss.
On the opposite side of the spectrum lies Mildred, Montags wife. In her attempting
suicide, Mildred proves ignorance isnt always bliss. Mildred is the typical ignorant follower of
this societys norms. She hates books and loves her family within her walls. (A wall is
basically a huge TV that takes up the space of a wall.) In the beginning of Fahrenheit 451, the
reader is told, off the bat, that something is wrong. The object he had sent tumbling with his
foot now glinted under the edge of his own bed. The small crystal bottle of sleeping tablets
which earlier today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty
in the light of the tiny flare. (11) Montag discovers, after coming home from a long day of
work, that Mildred is attempting suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills. Quickly, he calls some
people to pump the drugs out of Mildreds system. From this one quote, anyone could assume
that Mildred is not happy, but why wouldnt she be? In the novel, Mildred has so much stuff and

little requirements placed upon her. She doesnt have a difficult or strenuous job. She doesnt
have a lack of food or water. She isnt wanted by the law. Mildred is a completely average
human who lacks the knowledge books provide. Her unhappiness is summed up rather nicely
when Montag imagines her within her last moments in this book. He saw her in her hotel room
somewhere now in the half second remaining with the bombs a yard, a foot, and inch from her
building. He saw her leaning toward the great shimmering walls of color and motion where the
family talked and talked and talked to her, where the family prattled and chatted and said her
name and smiled at her and said nothing of the bomb that was an inch, now a half inch, now a
quarter inch from the top of the hotel. Leaning into the wall as if all the hunger of looking would
find the secret of her sleepless unease there. Mildred, leaning anxiously nervously, as if to
plunge, drop, fall into that swarming intensity of color to drown in its bright happiness. (152)
Montag imagines Mildreds life as sorrowful with her walls the only way to escape sadness;
however, the happiness she finds is only temporary. The moment her walls turn off, melancholy
consumes her again as a bomb continually falls only to eventually consume her in her end.
Finally, the overall fact that people are fighting for knowledge rather than ignorance says
it all. Early on in the book a woman kills herself over the idea of going back to a life of
ignorance. Beatty flicked his fingers to spark the kerosene. He was too late. Montag gasped.
The woman on the porch reached out with contempt to them all, and struck the kitchen match
against the railing. (37) After the firemen had stormed her house, the woman had two choices:
follow along with the firemens demands or go down with her ship. Clearly the woman felt huge
resentment for the life without her books packed with knowledge and chose to deny that world
the pleasure of having her life so she took it herself. She is not the only person fighting for
knowledge either. How many are there?/ Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks,

tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. (146) Thousands of people all fight for the simple
cause of protecting books and the knowledge they represent. If so many people are fighting for
knowledge, ignorance cannot possibly be bliss one hundred percent of the time.
While many people claim ignorance as bliss, Fahrenheit 451 claims differently. It shows
how ignorance can bring sorrow through multiple events like Mildreds death, Montag switching
over to books, and all of the people fighting for knowledge to survive. It is an absolute that
ignorance isnt always bliss.