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What is sadness? Sadness is, contrary to popular belief, a natural emotion or feeling. People feel sadness whenever they lose something that they previously enjoyed such as someone they loved, or something as simple as a stuffed animal. This particular emotion is actually good for you. It offers relief from the pain of the loss and it gives you some measure of the importance of what you’ve lost. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury strives to create a society that lives in the absence of sadness. He aspires to give everyone happiness by getting rid of conflict and inequality. However, what the society did not recognize was the value of this gloomy emotion. Guy Montag, the central character in the book, has learned to conform to the idea that the society he lives in is so very rigid and standard. However he eventually realizes that the society he lives in is not suitable for a happy life. In an attempt to solidify happiness, society became dehumanized through its abandonment of human instinct, which ironically caused society to become anaesthetized. In the various attempts to abolish despondency by the elimination of literature, all emotions in society were destroyed. In the past, the society was able to read books, and therefore had no reason to burn them. For this reason houses were not fireproof, and therefore Clarise alludes to the fact that firemen used to put out fires, not start them. (8.) Thus proving that at one point in this society, books were accepted and then eventually were banned. While education doesn’t seem like an awful attribute, it created inequality, which made people unhappy.
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