The deterioration of traditional family bonds is a notable theme in Fahrenheit 451 and a marked feature of the dystopian society it depicts. As people are no longer interested in books, preferring instead to while away the hours engrossed in mindless pabulum, they find it more difficult to empathize with each other. That even extends to members of their own family, to whom of course they'd normally have the strongest connections.
Take the Montag family, for instance. Guy and Mildred might as well live on different planets, so distant has their married life become. It's not so much that the two have drifted apart; after all, that would still happen in a normal society. It's rather that the society in which they live virtually encourages people to become separated from each other, the better for them to be controlled by the totalitarian government.
People have become so obsessed by the absolute dreck served up by the government on TV that they've entered a completely different world, a fantasy world from which intimacy, emotions, and close feelings towards real people have been completely eradicated. In such a hellish world, married women openly brag about not mourning the deaths of their husbands or about shutting their kids away in their rooms so they can watch TV in peace. This is a society in which family members don't spend time together, where they remain atomized in their own little words. The end result is that the family unit's cohesion is completely undermined, meaning that each individual member owes his or her primary loyalty not to their family, but to the state.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
What theme does the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury give about family deterioration and an explanation of the theme?
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