Farenheit 451

I think the most interesting character was Beaty. He was also the most bewildering. He changed his attitude so drastically moment to moment. You never could understand him. Most characters have a clear surface characteristics and other layers under that if you look hard enough, but Beaty has no clear attitude or characteristics. Montag has worked with him for a long time but no information is given about him. One moment Beaty is sypathetic and the nexthe is the devil.
Just the things Beaty talks about contradicts himself. He seems to believe book are stupid and wrong and yet knows all about them. He quotes millions of books carelessly in front of anybody as if he has nothing to be guilty about. He must of read so many books and several times to no words by heart and yet the only way to have done this was illegally possess books yet he flaunts his knowledge.
His conversation with Montag when Montag pretended to be sick and then at the firestation after and in front of Montag's house was too contradictive to me. I did not understand the point of pretending to try to help one minute and then burn down Montag's house the next. Why did he try to get Montag to give up the books if he was going to burn does his house anyway? What Beaty did never seemed to add up and yet he never appeared to be incapable of thought and off the wall crazy.

Bradbury Interviews

Bradbury wrote Farenheit to express his views of what technology will become and how we might use it to help with self limitation. I believe that Farenheit 451 is about censorship. Not from the government but from ourselves. We self-limit ourselves and perhaps bradbury believed he could stop people from closing their minds. That is what everybody was doing, staying with what was known and normal. In the future everybody kept acting and thinking as was acceptable and usual than, so blocked out the old ideals and stretched thoughts meant to astound that are written in books. As most kept trying to be more conservative to fit in, the boundaries for what was considered sane thought kept shrinking. But hasn't keeping with the values of the time always been around. How many of the great painters, writters, and philosophers of different times been shun then. They were brilliant because they expressed things not yet accepted bringing in new extreme thoughts. And yet most were considered nuts or merely unrecognized until years and decades later when people had slowly gotten use to them.
I do not believe we have become so unimaginative that we are all followers. We still make original jokes, think new thoughts, and have little or nothing in common with some people. Also books and television limit imagination about the same. I mean television tells a story just like a book. Reading books doesn't make you imagine anything as it is all written out, just like television. So portraying technology as if destroys all original thought and imagination, and books give you new thoughts and imagination is inaccurate and leaping to conclusions.