Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 invokes two paradigms of America: the paradigm of America in the 1950s 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The paradigm of 1950s America manifests itself predominantly in six different aspects of the novel. First, book burning in the novel's dystopian America comments on the American public's perception of book burnings in the 1950s. Following the Nazi book burnings that consumed numerous books and the anti-Semitic burning of Jewish books in Communist Russia, book burnings became an emblem of tyranny in the Western world. Most of the American public of the time conceptualized the book burner as the evil “other” – the Nazi or the Communist – and consequently perceived America as the champion of freedom, ceaselessly fighting against book burners and what they represent (Faragher, 809). This notion of Americanness as an oppositional force to book burning is destabilized in the novel by the near-unanimous approval of book burning by both the fictional American authorities and the fictional American public. Bradbury also directly encourages the reader to draw parallels between the 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 current events in America in the early 1950s: protests and lawsuits by religious and parent organizations against what they considered obscene literature led to the creation of the Gathings Committee, which asked publishers to impose restrictions on the content of paperback novels they intend to publish (Speer, 154-55); at the same time, two prominent members of the McCarthy administration undertook a campaign to “purge the United States Information Agency libraries of over thirty thousand works by Communists, fellow travelers, and unwitting promoters of the Soviet cause” (Ward, 2). Second, Faber's character, the involuntarily retired English professor, may allude to the McCarthy administration's persecution of academics: five years before the novel's publication, six professors at the University of Washington were accused of communist activity ( Schrecker, 93). Third, the dominance of mass culture, and especially mass media, in the novel's dystopian America reflects the rapid rise of mass culture in 1950s America: the fictional American public's preference for comic books compared to 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 television theaters corresponds to the unprecedented popularity of the mass media in 1950s America, to such an extent that, according to Maldwyn A. Jones, "television soon occupied American leisure time more than any other activity, becoming for most people's favorite form of entertainment as well as their primary source of information about what was going on in the world" (Jones, 593-4). Fourth, the incessant subway advertising of Denham products (Bradbury, 79) and Mildred's fierce desire to purchase additional components for thehis television living room (Bradbury, 20) demonstrate the surprising increase in American consumerism after the Second World War (Faragher, 851). Fifth, the alienation that permeates the novel reflects the sense of estrangement that afflicted the American middle class in the 1950s (Mills, 182-7). The different levels of each seem to manifest a certain aspect of estrangement in 1950s America: Montag's alienation from Mildred, due to his obsession with the mass media - "'I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls .'" (Bradbury, 82 ) – can be interpreted as Bradbury's criticism of the mass media as one of the causes of high divorce rates in 1950s America (Stevenson, 28); Clarisse's sense of isolation from her classmates—"'Oh, I don't miss it,' she said. 'I'm antisocial, they say.'" (Bradbury, 29)—may allude to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, published for the first time in the United States in 1951 and became a milestone in the discussion on the alienation of young Americans; finally, the fictional American public's indifference to the suffering of people in other countries – "we're so rich and the rest of the world is so poor and we just don't care if they are" (Bradbury, 73) – may reflect the lack of concern of the American public of the 1950s for the suffering of war-torn 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 might completely destroy itself. This fear was exacerbated by the revelation in the late 1940s that the Soviet Union had acquired the technology to create nuclear weapons (Hoskinson, 346). The American public was particularly scared of this information, due to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Bradbury incorporates this American fear into the novel, maintaining the contextual structure of America as the country that started the atomic war – "'we have started and won two atomic wars since 1990!'" (Bradbury, 73) – and adding a fictional tragic consequence : “Once they pulled off the bomb release, it was all over” (Bradbury, 158). Toward the end of the novel, when Montag flees into the desert, the text shifts from manifestations of the paradigm of 1950s America to manifestations of the American Puritan paradigm. 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 in the virgin lands of America and integrates into a new society founded on ideals themselves who were the cause of his persecution. Furthermore, the sequence of scenes in which Montag emerges from the river that nearly drowned him and subsequently leads Granger and his companions to a better future evokes Moses' crossing of the Red Sea and his leadership of the Israelites to the Promised Land . This biblical allusion is consonant with the Puritan paradigm, because the Puritans perceived their journey to New England as a re-enactment of the Exodus. Another manifestation of the Puritan paradigm is Montag's retention of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation in his mind, for to the extent that it becomes these texts: "'Montag... you are the book of Ecclesiastes'" (Bradbury, 151). In this context, Granger's promise - "We will pass down the books to our children" (Bradbury, 152-3) - resonates with John Winthrop's declaration that the ultimate goal of Puritan settlement in America is to "increase the body of Christianity". … that we and posterity may better preserve them” (Winthrop, 14). If we acceptthe 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 transmitting them to future generations, Montag is fulfilling the Puritan aspiration of increasing the body of Christ to posterity. Also, Montag's quotes from the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation - "To everything there is a season...And on both sides 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 narratives are saturated with biblical quotations that compare the events depicted, 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 the two paradigms of America 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: Montag's pursuit by the Mechanical Hound can be interpreted as a subtle reference to the hunting of fugitive African-American slaves by the owners' dogs. slaves, who, according to Jon T. Coleman, “helped guard human property…intimidated slaves and chased runaways” (Coleman, 483); Beatty's statement that book burning "actually started around something called the Civil War" (Bradbury, 54) alludes to the American Civil War; the fire department regulation refers to a founding father of the United States: “First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin” (Bradbury, 34). These nods to the American past indicate that the fictional America of the novel began to deteriorate toward the dystopian state of affairs depicted long before the McCarthy administration or the mass culture of the 1950s. By implicating Benjamin Franklin as the pioneer book burner, the author suggests that the very founding of the United States by the Founding Fathers was a crucial factor in America's gradual decline. Consequently, the author's portrayal of the Puritan paradigm, which preceded the Founding Fathers, as the antithesis to his dystopian America, can be interpreted as a call for America to return to its origins. We can therefore conjecture that the author postulates the Puritan paradigm as the last prelapsarian vision of America, while the paradigm of 1950s America is an advanced stage of the country's fall. The novel culminates in the fulfillment of John Winthrop's warning that "if wee wee act falsely...we shall put to shame the faces of many worthy servants of God, and cause their prayers to turn into curses upon us until we are consumed out of the good land, whether we are going" (Winthrop, 15). The inhabitants of dystopian America indeed behave falsely both towards themselves and towards others, and we can assume that they are cursed by their destitute neighbors, who declare war on them. Finally, they are in fact consumed by the flames. Bradbury cremates the manifestations of the American paradigm of the 1950s, to rekindle the American Puritan paradigm. Bring America back to square one and entrust the task of relocating it to Montag and his companions, who will be the new American pioneers. The novel ends with their procession into the city, thus echoing the Puritan dream of America as “a city upon a hill” (Winthrop, 15). Bradbury leaves the narrative open-ended, suggesting that perhaps the rebuilt city will be more faithful to the original vision. Readers can only hope that this time Montag and his descendants will create a new and better America. Works cited 21.2 (2007): 27-52.