Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 invokes two paradigms of America: the paradigm of 1950s America and the Puritan paradigm of America. This article will discuss how these paradigms manifest in the text, the relationship between them, and how the author uses them to posit his conceptualization of America's history and future. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayThe paradigm of 1950s America manifests itself primarily in six different aspects of the novel. First, the book burning in the novel's dystopian America comments on the American public's perception of book burning in the 1950s. In the aftermath of the Nazi fires that consumed many books and the anti-Semitic burnings of Jewish books in communist Russia, book burning became the emblem of tyranny in the Western world. The majority of the American public at the time conceptualized the book burner as the evil “other” – the Nazi or the communist – and therefore perceived America as the champion of freedom, constantly fighting against the book burners and what they represent (Faragher, 809). This notion of Americanness as an opposing force to book burning is destabilized in the novel by the almost unanimous approval of book burning by fictional American authorities and by the fictional American public. Bradbury even directly encourages the reader to draw parallels between fictional book burning and contemporary events, noting in the Coda: "There is more than one way to burn a book" (Bradbury, 176). Bradbury does not reveal what events he is referring to, but this comment resonates strongly with American news in the early 1950s: protests and lawsuits by religious and parental organizations against what they considered obscene literature led to the creation of the Gathings Committee, which demanded that publishers place restrictions on the content of paperback novels they intended to publish (Speer, 154-55); simultaneously, two prominent members of the McCarthy administration began a campaign to "purge the libraries of the United States Information Agency of more than thirty thousand works authored by communists, fellow travelers, and unwitting promoters of the Soviet cause” (Ward, 2). Second, the character of Faber, the involuntarily retired English professor, may allude to the McCarthy administration's persecution of academics: five years before the novel's publication, charges of communist activities were filed against six members of the faculty at the University of Washington (Schrecker, 93). Third, the predominance of mass culture, and especially mass media, in the novel's dystopian America reflects the rapid ascendancy of mass culture in 1950s America: the preference of the fictional American public for comics rather than for more complex and ambiguous texts (Bradbury, 57). ) reflects the substantial increase in comic book sales (Faragher, 809) and the simultaneous decline in paperback sales (Speer, 154) in 1950s America; The fictional American public's obsession with their living room televisions corresponded with the unprecedented popularity of mass media in 1950s America, so much so that, according to Maldwyn A. Jones, "television quickly occupied more of their time free to Americans than any other activity, becoming for most people the preferred form of entertainment as well as the primary source of information about what is happeningin the world” (Jones, 593-4). Fourth, the incessant subway advertising for Denham products (Bradbury, 79) and Mildred's fierce desire to purchase other components for her television room (Bradbury, 20) attest to the striking increase in American consumerism after the Second World War (Faragher, 851). Fifth, the alienation that permeates the novel reflects the sense of estrangement that plagued the American middle class in the 1950s (Mills, 182-7). The different levels of these alienations each seem to manifest some facet of estrangement in 1950s America: Montag's alienation from Mildred, due to his obsession with mass media - "'I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls.'” (Bradbury, 82) – can be interpreted as Bradbury's criticism of mass media as one of the causes of high divorce rates in 1950s America. (Stevenson, 28); Clarisse's feeling of isolation from her classmates - "'Oh, they don't miss me,' she said. 'I'm antisocial, they say.'" (Bradbury, 29) – may refer to JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. , which was first published in the United States in 1951 and became a milestone in the debate over the alienation of American youth; finally, the fictional American public's indifference to the suffering of people in other countries - "we are so rich and the rest of the world so poor and we don't care that they are" (Bradbury, 73 ) – may reflect the 1950s American public's lack of interest in the fate of war-devastated Europe (Griffith, 23). The sixth manifestation of the paradigm of 1950s America in the novel is the atomic bombing of the fictional American city. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Western liberals began to fear that humanity would completely self-destruct. This fear was exacerbated by the revelation in the late 1940s that the Soviet Union had acquired the technology necessary to create nuclear weapons (Hoskinson, 346). The American public was particularly frightened by this intelligence, due to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Bradbury incorporates this American fear into the novel, maintaining the contextual framework of America as the country that initiated atomic war – “we have started and won two atomic wars since 1990!” "" (Bradbury, 73) – and adding a fictional tragic consequence: "Once the bomb was dropped, it was over" (Bradbury, 158). Toward the end of the novel, when Montag escapes into the wilderness, the text shifts from manifestations of the 1950s American paradigm to manifestations of the Puritan paradigm of America. Montag's escape corresponds to the Puritan journey to New England: like the Puritans, Montag exiles himself from a society that persecutes him, crosses a body of water, arrives on the virgin lands of America and integrates into a new society based on the very ideals. this was the cause of his persecution. Furthermore, the sequence of scenes in which Montag emerges from the river that nearly drowned him and then leads Granger and his companions to a better future, evokes Moses' crossing of the Red Sea and his leading the Israelites to the Promised Land. This biblical allusion is consistent with the Puritan paradigm, as the Puritans viewed their journey to New England as a reenactment of the Exodus. Another manifestation of the Puritan paradigm is Montag's preservation of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation in his mind, to the extent that he becomes these texts: "'Montag…you are the book of Ecclesiastes '” (Bradbury, 151). In this context, the promise ofGranger – “We will pass down the books to our children” (Bradbury, 152-3) – resonates with John Winthrop's statement that the ultimate goal of Puritan colonization of America is to “increase the body of Christendom.” . …that we and our posterity may be best preserved” (Winthrop, 14). If we accept the idea that a subject's words are an extension of his body, then by preserving the words of God and his Son for the purpose of passing them on to future generations, Montag realizes the Puritan aspiration to increase the body of Christ for posterity. Additionally, Montag's quotes from the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation – “For everything there is a season…And on each side of the river there was a tree of life” (Bradbury, 165 ) – manifest the Puritan paradigm by alluding to Puritan captivity narratives, such as Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Mrs. Mary Rowlandson's Restoration. These stories are saturated with biblical quotations that compare the events described, taking place in America, to biblical scenes, with the express purpose of promoting the Puritan vision of America as the new Promised Land. Having discussed the manifestations of America's two paradigms in the novel, I would now like to explore the relationship between them. I suggest that this relationship can be extrapolated from the novel's invocation of various elements of America's collective past: the Clockwork Dog's pursuit of Montag can be interpreted as a subtle reference to the hunt for runaway African-American slaves by the dogs of slave owners, who, according to Jon T. Coleman, “helped control human property…intimidate slaves and hunt down runaways” (Coleman, 483); Beatty's assertion that book burning "really started around a thing called the Civil War" (Bradbury, 54) alludes to the American Civil War; the firefighter rulebook refers to a founding father of the United States: “First Firefighter: Benjamin Franklin” (Bradbury, 34). These allusions to the American past indicate that the fictional America in the novel began to deteriorate toward the dystopian situation depicted long before the McCarthy administration or the mass culture of the 1950s. Implicating Benjamin Franklin as the pioneer of book burning, the author suggests that the very creation of the United States by the Founding Fathers was a crucial factor in America's gradual decline. Therefore, the author's depiction of the Puritan paradigm, which preceded the Founding Fathers, as an antithesis to his dystopian America, can be interpreted as a call for America to return to its origins. It can therefore be assumed that the author posits the Puritan paradigm as the last prelapsarian vision of America, while the paradigm of 1950s America is a late stage in the country's downfall. The novel culminates with the realization of John Winthrop's warning that "if we will treat ourselves falsely...we will shame the faces of many worthy servants of God and cause their prayers to turn into curses upon us until let us be consumed out of the good land, let us go there” (Winthrop, 15). The people of dystopian America indeed act falsely, both towards themselves and towards others, and we can assume that they are cursed by their deprived neighbors, who wage war against them. Eventually, they are actually consumed by the flames. Bradbury incinerates the manifestations of the American paradigm in the 1950s, in order to revive the puritanical paradigm of America. He takes America back to square zero and entrusts the task of reestablishing it to Montag and his companions, who will be the new American pioneers. The novel is 21.2 (2007): 27-52.