Greetings Persistent Writers! Here is my latest analysis: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
As a refresher from my copywork blogpost (click here to read the full post), here is the color coding on the highlights:
- Orange for Action beats
- Green for Descriptions
- No highlights for Dialogue
- Yellow for Summary/Transition
- Blue for Thoughts
- Pink for Authorial/Narrator Intrusion
- Purple for Exposition
A double highlight means that a sentence is functioning with more than one mode.
Copying these two scenes felt like I was standing close to Ray Bradbury. The narrator doesn’t seem to have a persona of their own; they sound like Ray Bradbury.
His style in this book is verbose, sometimes flowery. For example, “He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.” And another, “Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.”
His choice of being verbose allows him to be poetic. Apart from his long sentences, he uses a lot of metaphors such as: “He strode in a swarm of fireflies.”
The story is set in a dystopian future, which contrasts with Bradbury’s flowery prose and levity. Had the tone conformed with this dystopian setting, the story would have been grueling and depressing to read.
Fire is the main symbol of the story. The opening scene hooks us immediately with the following imagery: Montag igniting the kerosene hose and setting books on fire. In this scene, fire is used to destroy, but as the story progresses, it used for cleansing.
The phoenix, a mythic figure that symbolizes rebirth, is an ironic symbol. The phoenix is shown on Montag’s uniform, and despite the firemen wearing this symbol, they are not agents of change, but rather agents of preservation, preserving the status quo. The phoenix reiterates the motif of “fire that cleanses.”
Since these are the opening scenes, there is no element of suspense or tension. The author’s intent is to establish the setting and the main character.
Below, I have graphed the narrative modes of the copied scene, showing the rhythm between abstract and concrete beats. It scales from -3 to 3 with the following sequence: Exposition, Intrusion, Thought, Transition, Description, Dialogue and Action.
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