Here are a couple of resources you may find helpful in completing your data sheets for you summer reading of Fahrenheit 451. The first is an introduction to the novel and the author that I put together for the Middle School class last Spring.
Fahrenheit 451 - An Introduction (PDF)
The second is Ray Bradbury's official website: RAY
By way of trivia, Bradbury is the only living author we'll be studying this year. (Arthur Miller died four years ago.) If you liked F451, you might want to read Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of my favorite books
ReplyDelete"As a young child, he was
ReplyDeleteexposed to horror movies of the period, such as The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback
of Notre Dame. Reminiscent of Montag in Fahrenheit 451, the heroes of these stories were
social outcasts." While I was reading this, this sentence stuck out. First of all, the Hunchback and the Phantom cannot be reminiscent of Guy Montag because the two characters were made before Fahrenheit 451 was written. Second, I don't think that Guy Montag was a social outcast until after he had killed Captain Beatty. Before that, Montag was considered one of society's heroes. So I think that the comparison between Guy Montag and both the Phantom and the Hunchback is somewhat fallacious.
Freak, good point -- but "reminiscent" here depends upon the perspective: If from the perspective of the writer, the Hunchback and the Phantom could not be "reminiscent" of Guy Montag, given the chronology of written works (and their early adaptations). But looking at it from the reader's perspective -- the American reader who is typically introduced to Bradbury before Frenchmen Hugo and Leroux -- Hunch and Phantom certainly can be "reminiscent" of Guy Montag. The chronology from the reader's perspective depends upon the order in which he reads the books, not upon the order in which the books were written (or their adaptations made).
ReplyDeleteFreak, of course, is correct: Montag was not a "social outcast" until he flamed his boss. But one of the important points of the book is that Montag does indeed become a social outcast, hunted by the Hound -- and on national TV. After all, Fahrenheit 451 is not a tale of Montag's decade of being a hero as one of the Happiness Boys, but of his rebelliousness brought on by the inciting force: Clarisse McClellan.
That being said, I could see a case being made for the comparison being weak or inadequate, though hardly fallacious.
I would like to point that in that context "reminiscent" would be used correctly, but if you look at the context of this paragraph it is still used incorrectly.
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