Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as an Allegory of McCarthian Era

Abstract

In the fictional world of Fahrenheit 451, the intellectuals and the reading culture are prohibited and the fire house and the consumerist culture are promoted by the authoritarian state.Ray Bradbury writes this sci-fi novel in order to critique the unusual and uncomfortable incidents happening in the McCarthian era.Guy Montag is a firemen who questions on his happiness and jobof boo burning, compelshimtoflee to the wilderness in order to escape from the authoritarian state ideologies andhopes to reconstruct the society of reading culture in a future.The state allocates the firemen and the Mechanical Hound as its state apparatuses to prevail its power over the people. These apparatuses work as per the order of the state to scrutinize over the citizens’ activities. Therefore, the books and its possible readers are on the constant surveillance of the state mechanisms. In a sense, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 allegorizes the anecdotes of McCarthian Era of American political history of 1950 s. Thus, this the sisre interprets Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as a text by using the oretical methodology of the French Marxist critic Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology and state apparatus.From Althusserian notion of state ideology, this tussle between the state and individual is a reflection of authoritarian imposition to its subject to get consent to be ruled; to prolong state power.Key Words: Althusser, communism,ideology,McCarthyism,reading culture,state apparatus,surveillance,