Farenheit 451 paper

[Nan in Mass]

This is a paper my son wrote on Farenheit 451. I asked him to write a literary analysis paper and left him to decide the topic. In the past, his papers flowed beautifully but content-wise and organization-wise were a mess. This time, I asked him to concentrate on the organization and the content and not try to make the paper read well. I also told him not to spend forever fixing it. We would welcome your comments. As you can tell, he hated the writing style, being an impatient 17yo technically-minded boy.

 

 

 

Fahrenheit 451

 

 

 

 

Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451 has three elements in the writing style which make is extremely difficult to read. The author blurs one image into the next, making it hard to accurately visualize the story. Bradbury uses analogies which are too long to be practical, forcing his audience to flip back and forth through the pages in order to follow the plot. Lastly, the author switches between what the main character is thinking, and what is actually happening, with very little warning, making it again hard to follow the plot.

“The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward.”(pg. 5) This sentence is confusing to the reader because the author describes the girl as alternately holding still while the leaves blow past her, moving without walking, and walking in time with the leaves and the wind. The first two images are inaccurate and do not help convey the intended message.

“Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl’s face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to se the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darkness, but moving also toward a new sun.”

This analogy goes on for a full paragraph, to describe an image which could be summed up by the word “ghostly”. By the time the reader has finished the paragraph, the original intent has been forgotten and must be reviewed.

“The numbness will go away, he thought. It’ll take time, but I’ll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that’s gone, I’m lost without it.

The subway fled past him, cream tile, jet-black, cream tile, jet-black, numerals and darkness, more darkness and the total adding itself,

Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel cousin had said, “Fill this sieve and you’ll get a dime!” And the faster he poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering. His hands were tired, and the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. Seated there in the midst of July, without a sound, he felt the tears move down his cheeks.”

Ray Bradbury has written three paragraphs, all in a similar style, all with similar subject matter, but the first is his thoughts, the second is “reality”, and the third is a memory. These three paragraphs serve only to confuse the issue.

There is barely a page in the entire book which does not have an overcomplicated image in it.

 

Thanks,

Nan

Edited February 24, 2012 by Nan in Mass

[elegantlion]

I am not qualified to check the paper, but the one technical error is that he does not list page numbers for any but the first quote. I would want consistency.

 

I opened this to see what he said about F-451, one of my favorite books ever! I adore Bradbury, but he does have a certain style.

 

I have not explored this, but it's a question that I had when reading. Is the style of writing more indicative of Bradbury himself or the time in which it was written (1953). I haven't read all of Bradbury's work, but I've found some of his short stories easier to read. Something Wicked this Way Comes (1962) also has a certain feel, but feels easier and more modern, with the exception of the father's speech in the library late in the book.

[Jean in Newcastle]

I had to smile a bit, Nan, since his dislike of Bradbury's writing style came through so loud and clear.:) His whole thesis is that it is difficult to read. And here is my problem with the essay - he's not really evaluating the literature on anything other than his view that it is complicated and confusing to him. I'm used to literary analysis essays dealing with topics of theme and characterization. I hope that Ester Maria stops by to give her view on this.

[Ester Maria]

Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451

Work / novel.

The first two images are inaccurate and do not help convey the intended message.

Never play the "what the author wanted to say" game (it is one of the deadly sins of writing in my book :tongue_smilie:). You can only speculate what was his intended message, you must take the work "as is".

Furthermore, the whole talk about "message" is extremely problematic. Artistic texts are defined by their *form* way more than by their *content* or any "psychology" behind them (in terms of intended messages, states of mind which brought the author to write what he wrote, etc.).

By the time the reader has finished the paragraph, the original intent has been forgotten and must be reviewed.

Ditto.

Ray Bradbury has written three paragraphs, all in a similar style, all with similar subject matter, but the first is his thoughts, the second is “reality”, and the third is a memory. These three paragraphs serve only to confuse the issue.

And here.

There is barely a page in the entire book which does not have an overcomplicated image in it.

Judgment. :tongue_smilie: And too informal.

A better way to go about it would be to attempt to discuss how those images fit into the structure of the work and why, in his opinion, the structure of the work depends so largely upon them, and why is the language used in such a peculiar way to incorporate several levels of happening / thinking without clear distinctions, and what effect does that on the whole produce, etc.

 

I am with him, though, about disliking many elements of Bradbury's style, LOL. His paper reasonated with me. :D

[Nan in Mass]

By "message", he meant the transimission of the basic facts of the plot to the reader, I think. He understood the message (as in the social commentary) of the book but thought it was so obvious that it wasn't worth talking about. The same thing happened when he read Emerson lol. At 17, he isn't exactly the best at understanding how what seems perfectly obvious to us now might not have been obvious to everyone at the time when the book was written. I knew better than to ask him to write about that. Anyway, it is helpful to have input on his paper other than mine. Writing this sort of paper is not on his radar at the moment.

 

Thanks, everyone.

Nan

[Sebastian (a lady)]

I think that he is misreading a couple of the sections he quotes.

 

For example, I don't think that the clock analogy is intended to convey ghostliness. My perception is that the girl is memorable to him because she seems to know so much and understand so much. The metaphor with the clock seems to imply that she has an internal balance that permits her to be a guide to others and that she has an inner radiance as a result of this secret knowledge that draws his eye to her.

 

On the earlier quotation about the leaves and the sidewalk, the paragraph isn't saying that she is moving, not moving and moving slower than the leaves. The visual image being painted is that she is moving at the same speed as the leaves, which makes it seem as if she is on a sliding sidewalk (like an airport people mover - which would have been only imaginary or else very uncommon in the '50s). The stillness in this line is the perceived stillness - as if she is on a sliding walk.

 

If he is going to go with a paper that asserts a writing style is overly flowery or complicated, then I would expect a few more examples and more analysis from the essay writer. As it is right now, it reads a bit grumpy. It is possible to critique a piece as overwritten and confusing. But it is a fine line to walk. It is easy for the essay to come off to the grader as complaining that because the reader didn't understand, the fault likes with the writing style. Because most lit teachers assign works that they think are important or well crafted, if you are going to argue that they are not well crafted, you have to be very on your game.

[cathmom]

I also think that you can't claim that "the reader" can't remember what the image was supposed to be describing. I just read this book for the first time and did not have the same problem. In fact, I loved his imagery and the feel it gave to the "work/novel" (EM, ;))

 

It did come off a little grumpy, as someone said. :)

[Kristin in Hawaii]

I'm not going to be very helpful but will ditto the other posters.

 

I couldn't help but think this reminds me of how folks have gotten used to a clipped and quick read and transition. When we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and (OMG!) Lawrence of Arabia the teen-agers couldn't stand the long intro and developing scenes. I found that re-reading those lines your son quoted allowed me to savor the scenes, imagining it in my mind's eye, drawing me into the moment with them. Mmmm mmmm good! One of my favorite books!

[cathmom]

When we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and (OMG!) Lawrence of Arabia the teen-agers couldn't stand the long intro and developing scenes.

 

I'm sorry - I'm 40 and dh and I love old movies, but we couldn't make it through Lawrence of Arabia - it was literally the most boring movie I have ever seen!

[Kristin in Hawaii]

... I understand the previous poster's feeling about L of A -- I also struggled with it at first but then it caught me. I had no prior knowledge of the history of Europe AND the Middle East.... which contributes to my happiness in discovering a history book I plan to use with the high-school coop group this fall, History of Europe and the Middle East, published by Oxford as a Course Companion for the IB programme. My earlier education was US-centric, something I've been working to remedy for at least 10 years now :tongue_smilie: