I see Pazuzu

You cannot look at this and tell me it isn't a supervillain lair.

That's rather snarky for someone interpreting a book, on reddit, dude. Chill. And if you don't want people bringing this up, don't say censorship wasn't a part of the book in your comment. Just edit it.

Bradbury himself, early on, described censorship as a theme of the book. It is indeed a valid interpretation.

Fahreinheit 451 is a remarkable book, and I frequently waver on how I feel about it.

On the one hand its a great piece on the propensity for people to willingly surrender inalienable rights. Books are not banned in the novel because of a massive totalitarian state like in 1984, books are banned due to popular demand for them to be banned. Society in the book grew resentful of books as the medium of intellectuals. When television and radio and games could deliver faster, more sensory forms of entertainment, books became the realm of thoughtful and unpleasant emotions, and were soon banned by a culture that didn't want negative emotional senses, only the instantaneous bombardment of film, tv and radio.

On the other hand, I cannot help but feel as though Bradbury descends into snobbery, shunning entire mediums of art simply because they appear by screen rather than print. His disdain for television was well known, but unjustified. We can show some of the most sophisticated and thoughtful writing of our time on television, and we do. A person listening to something on headphones may just as easily take in Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor or a podcast on the History of Rome as they could a heavy metal album or a new rap single. The medium may be the message, but that doesn't mean the message is to be written off, especially when one's judgements border on elitism.

Bradbury also had some contentious opinions on the meaning of the book, and he would give different meanings throughout his life. Early on, he claimed it was about censorship and was inspired by HUAC. Later, he would say it was about the dangers of television and easy stimuli, dismissing censorship themes entirely. Personally, I never liked this kind of absolute dismissal of the censorship themes, and I remember being disappointed to read that he walked out of a guest lecture when some students at a college insisted that censorship was a valid interpretation of the book. I'm of the belief that Death of the Author is a valid method of interpreting a work, and its presence in F451 is undeniable, even if its unconventionally a form of censorship by popular demand. I mean, aren't most forms of censorship that we here about the result of popular demand rather that government overreach? Fahrenheit 451 itself would be one of a slew of books frequently named in conservative communities' calls to ban books from schools and libraries. That's government institutions trying to prevent communities from censoring art, not the other way around.

I also take issue with Bradbury's myopic idea that the answer to censorship, especially for ideas of the work being bigoted or offensive, was simply to have minority groups write their own stories. He said that if every group got to omit from art the parts that offended them, we would have bare pages. While I see what he's getting at, he fails to account for a fundamental aspect of the downtrodden or repressed. The nature of being out of power or disenfranchised is that it is significantly more difficult to have your story written, edited, and published. The poor are not as often able to write books about their perspective. Black authorship only recently took off in American history. Making sure that someone can write something bigoted and stupid may ensure that a person of color can write whatever they want, but historically, in America, it doesn't guarantee it, and there are more barriers to the creation of art than just plain censorship, whether by a government or the people.