ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos

Fahrenheit 451 and "Harrison Bergeron" 18132 Views

Share It!

Description:

We may be into the whole online education thing, but we love our books more than anything. So the thought of someone burning them? Or of a life without them? Now that’s our definition of a dystopia.

Author:

Author / Bradbury - Ray Bradbury

Language:

English Language

Subjects:

Tags:

Form / Novel

Common Core Standards:

Transcript

00:04
Fahrenheit 451 and Harrison Bergeron, a la Shmoop.
00:09
One of life's simple pleasures is to read a book by a roaring fire. Afterward, you might
00:13
enjoy a nice mug of hot cocoa.
00:15
Chances are, you probably won't follow it up by tossing your book into the fire.
00:19
Not unless you're a Nazi, a character in Fahrenheit 451... or really unhappy with The Casual Vacancy.

00:27
Book burning was popular in real-life dystopias
00:30
like Nazi Germany, where they burned books written by...well, anyone they disagreed with.
00:35
Which included... a lot of people. It may have inspired Ray Bradbury to create
00:40
Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, a world where firemen don't fight fires...
00:45
...they start them. In Bradbury's vision of the future, all
00:49
books are banned, and whenever one is found the firemen are sent in like pyromaniac-exterminators
00:53
to deal with the problem.
00:59
When one fireman named Guy Montag starts questioning whether it's really such a good idea to incinerate every book out there, he's
01:05
in for a world of trouble...
01:07
A world of trouble that includes vicious, mechanical dogs.
01:11
Though many assume that Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship...
01:15
There's actually some debate on the subject.
01:18
On one side is its author, Ray Bradbury, who says the book is actually about the evils
01:21
of television sapping our attention spans.
01:28
On the other side is...just about everyone else.
01:31
Um...what were we talking about again?
01:35
Oh, yeah...TV. And books. That's right.
01:39
Maybe Bradbury's right, and TV has corrupted our attention span.
01:46
Another story about the dystopia that television has wrought is Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron."
01:51
In case you didn't guess it from the title of the story, the main character is named Harrison Bergeron.
01:57
... a kid who was born with the terrible curse of being tall, athletic, and handsome.
02:02
In most places these traits would be awesome, but in Harrison's world, being exceptional
02:07
is forbidden by law.
02:10
Everyone has to be equal, so anyone who is smart, strong, attractive, or... in any way
02:16
awesome... is weighed down so that they become as common as everyone else.
02:20
When Harrison tries to rebel and let his awesomeness shine, he faces a fate worse than mechanical dogs.
02:28
What's a person to do when exceptional people
02:29
like Harrison aren't allowed to shine?
02:32
Sit around and watch TV, of course.
02:34
Unfortunately the TV is pretty boring, too. The comedy isn't funny.
02:39
The soap operas don't have any hot people.
02:45
And people sing worse than the last batch of rejects on Bulgerian Idol.
02:54
Imagine it: nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to do.
03:00
Eternal boredom.
03:02
Maybe you can get a job as an accountant to... liven up your life.
Full Transcript