Fahrenheit 451 - 1

1) What does the writing reveal about the author's values and attitudes?  From what perspective does he/she write?  

Bradbury writes from a third-person limited omniscient perspective through Fahrenheit 451.  The story is told from an outside narrator, but only follows the thoughts and actions of Guy Montag.  The whole novel is trying to make a specific point about the time period it follows, which is set many years in the future.  The entire story is centered around the idea of the world being overrun by modern technology and losing sight of the things that are of true value.  In this case, those valuable things are books.  Bradbury's book is trying to make a statement.  During the time when this was written, color television was the new big thing.  Everyone was obsessing over television!  The whole point of Fahrenheit 451 was to bring back to significance of literature to the modernizing world.  
This really tells you a lot of things about Bradbury's values and attitudes.  Bradbury clearly valued literature over media, and it was apparent that he felt quite strongly about that.  This is especially obvious when considering the fact that he devoted much of his time writing an entire novel about an exaggerated version of a quite possible outcome.  If you think about it, the people of his time were not exactly pondering what they were hearing, they were only taking in information.  This was something that frightened Bradbury, he references it multiple times through the book (Bradbury 76, 143, 144, etc.).  It would have been a real concern to me as well.  Fahrenheit 451 was meant to make this changing world obvious to the reader.  The idea of an interactive television tearing into people's lives may have seemed far-fetched then, but think about how possible that is now (Bradbury 23).  Leaps are constantly being made in technology, which is why the world needs to bring their attention back to older, yet still valuable resources that are readily available today.  
This novel brings up many valid points to people who may have been losing sight of literary importance.  Talking about burning books because they would essentially bring you up, then tear you back down; burning books because they were contradicting and confusing people; burning books because they were too censored, just for the sake of minorities (Bradbury 75-76).  These were exaggerated possibilities from that time!  Who knew what would happen if people did not stop to think about what they were subjecting themselves to.  This novel changed the thinking of many people during the 1950s.  

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1954