Reflections on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

When reading this book in high school I was saddened by the society's lack of care towards the individual. The people are trapped in a society that rejects knowledge and encourages ignorance. Personal relationships are essentially extinct and the people settle for plugging into this utopian society's version of a sitcom. The main character's wife is very captured by this and it continues to be a point of frustration for him. It is overwhelmingly distopic to think of a time when personal relationships would be eliminated. The biggest part of this book that genuinely hurts my heart is that all literature is banned to guarantee the people's ignorance to what history was like. Not only is the literature banned but it is burned. It makes me cringe just writing it out! A world without knowledge, self expression, emotional connections with other humans, and literature is not a world I would survive. I would not settle for that.