by Jonathan Ellington

Created on: November 23, 2010

Fahrenheit 451 represents stagnation based in too much conformity to societal norms. Here, social deviance is the focus as banned books provide a clear-cut consensus for which to examine deviance from societal values. Within the film adaptation, it is clear that perfect conformity to the banned book norm is required in order to not be considered a criminal. This appears to be based in the explicit recognition that not all people have equal opportunity for realizing their goals and that this inequality can generate deviance. However, as Durkheim notes, the citizens of this world go too far to correct for inequality, creating societal stagnation which not only places a halt on criminal mindedness, but also stifles progressive creativity and innovation.

Montag, the story protagonist, is a fireman that burns books for a living. His job is to insure that crazy ideas contained within books do not somehow make it into people’s heads. The idea stems from that mentioned by his boss: that people get ideas from books that make them unhappy and unsettle them when they realize that they cannot have all the things they read about in books. The boss notes that the people become unsociable. The hint is that they become deviants when they start thinking new ideas that do not conform to consensus.

However, the world of Fahrenheit 451 is filled with humdrum boredom, boring citizens, and a general lack of innovation. Aside from the ready admission that seizing their books and prosecuting the citizens seems insane, the focus here is that society itself is unable to move forward with any sizable progress. Note that people that are different are simply fired from their jobs on the basis of being different in this world. Durkheim states that deviance and even crime is normal and that it is only bad when anomie occurs. Anomie is a state of complete chaos within a civil state. Furthermore, according to Merton, deviance comes about from social stratification or inequalities of people within social structure. This contrasts sharply with the attitude taken with Montag’s boss, who says that the problem is that no one can agree on anything.

According to Durkheim, deviance is necessary for social change. Therefore, in order to get improvements to society, the stifling of new ideas through the banning of books creates stability through stagnation within Montag’s  society. However, too little change creates societal decay. For instance, the Spartans were so extremely

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>