Setting

  - ~ ~ ~ S e t t i n g ~ ~ ~ -

The story //Fahrenheit 451// takes place in a twisted, futuristic version of the United States in a time after 2022 (probably sometime between 2300 and 2400), but it is a much different America than the one we now know. As Beatty puts it, “Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.” People who are well-read may target others because they know something, so the books are burned. People are “happy” because the minorities aren’t disturbed; books that might upset the minorities are burned. All houses have a fire-proof coating; people watch the parlor walls (an equivalent to our television) that tell them what to think. Police arrest people who have books and firemen burn the books and the houses where they have been hidden. There are still woods and autumn leaves and dew and rain and a man in the moon, but almost everyone is in too much of a hurry to look. It is a world in which the U.S. is hated because the rest of the world is starving and the people don't care. Black bomber jets tear the sky apart each night heading to the war that the people feel certainly won’t affect their life.

Kindergarten starts soon after babies leave the cradle so that the home environment doesn’t affect children very much, and the parents see their children as little nuisances. Teens commit suicide and kill each other and nobody cares; the body is burned and life moves on. Cars race down the highways at a hundred miles an hour and the billboards are stretched two hundred feet long to compensate. One can be arrested for being a pedestrian, and most ominously, there is never any time to think about such trivial matters as the state of things. Anything that could promote thought outside the normal seal of life has been eradicated, front porches included. Those few who do think freely are dismissed as insane. The setting is an important part of the plot. Montag is upset and distraught with the way his world handles matters. He wants the world to be the way it used to be when there were books and free-thinking people. He disapproves with almost every aspect of his world and is determined to try to change it. This story takes place in America, somewhere east of St. Louis. We think that it takes place in Elm Terrace. Some states and cities are also mentioned in various places in the book. Near the end of the book, Montag is instructed by Faber to run away along the railroad to and to contact him in St. Louis, Missouri. Montag traveled along a river, which we believe could have been the Ohio River.