Comforting Fictions: A Neo-Marxist Analysis of the Role of Technology and Mass Media in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit ۴۵۱

Through using technology and mass media, the totalitarian government depicted in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit ۴۵۱ changes people’s dream of utopia into a nightmarish dystopia. Fahrenheit ۴۵۱ portrays a government which has become a subtly resourceful despotism sheltering itself behind comforting fictions generated by a gigantically overdeveloped electronic media, as one form of technology used to control people’s mind. The present paper aims at analyzing Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit ۴۵۱ which illustrates the way the modern societies use the instrument of technology for their own advantage in order to colonize people’s minds bringing about the homogeneity of the individuals and creating one-dimensional human beings with one aspect of technology controlling their lives. As for the methodology, neo-Marxist theories of Frankfurt School critics are used in order to investigate Bradbury’s portrayal of the way such technologies as television and mass media are employed in order to produce a new phenomenon in the shape of a uniform and debased mass culture which is exploited to silence criticism. Neo-Marxist critics believe that the modern governments exercise unlimited power through technology and media in order for controlling their subjects. Hence, the totalitarian state depicted in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit ۴۵۱ utilizes the power of technology in order to indoctrinate, manipulate, and promote a false consciousness that is so inured as to be immune to invalidation. The results of the present study indicate that through picturing homes equipped with several forms of technology including television screens, the programming of which is simplistic and subject to extremely rapid alterations, Bradbury shows how totalitarian governments use technology and mass media to keep citizens entertained, content, tractable, distracted, and divided and, thus, finally bring about their silence and stasis.

Keywords:

Neo-Marxism , Frankfurt School , technology , mass media , Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit ۴۵۱