Though Guy enjoys being around Clarisse, he feels more like a father to her. Guy is not physically attracted to her but is drawn to her unique perspective and probing questioning. He is emotionally intrigued by her, but has no desire for a romantic relationship.
Some people may say that Guy does not love Mildred because he states that he would not be sad if she were dead. He even imagines her thinking of her empty life as a bomb drops on the city. However, those people are ignoring the fact that society has affected their relationship. Though Guy does love his wife, it is difficult for him to show it because the people in this future do not know how to react to real emotion. Guy shows that he loves her, however, by wanting her to be a part of all aspects of his life, even when he decides to read books. He also shows he loves her by his intense reaction to her drug overdose. Guy thinks he wouldn’t be sad if she died, and yet his intense reaction when he thought she was gone shows that there is love there.
Change is good. So says the cliché and so goes the common wisdom. Too often things can become stagnant and even consistency can get old. However, not all change is for the better. Artists, directors, and authors often address this idea of bad changes through exploring the future. Often, they move the problems of today to their probable destinations to warn their audience. Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, saw some of these bad changes taking place in the area of censorship. Bradbury worried that eventually censorship would become rampant, and invented a future world where almost all books in the world were censored. People didn’t care about reading and the government was all too quick to prohibit all books that might require people to think or inspire them to rebel. Censorship, or the act or practice of supervising the morality of others, is a dangerous game. And though censorship hasn’t quite progressed to the levels that Bradbury predicted, it can sometimes get out of control. Opponents of censorship would argue that in all cases, censorship is wrong because it changes original works and enforces one person’s morality on another. This is a narrow view. Because of the many different definitions of censorship, censorship can be okay when it is universally accepted, when it is protecting younger people, and when its sole purpose is to preserve the integrity of the original work. And looking at Fahrenheit 451, we can see that even Ray Bradbury would agree with that.
Because it is all speculation, it is difficult to know if Guy would have become as rebellious as he did if he had not met Clarisse. However, if the evidence is examined closely, one can see that he would not have tried to bring the whole system down without meeting Clarisse. He had done some illegal things but hadn’t changed his thinking until he met her and spoke with her. Also, “losing” her caused a large imbalance in his life that motivated him to talk to Faber and set in motion the final events of the novel.
(Without Clarisse, his life would have stayed the same, but would have been vaguely uncomfortable. Clarisse pinpointed the problems: he was unhappy and society was holding him down.)
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