Burn It Beatty Burned The Book Summary

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Beatty’s monologue lands in the border of frenzie and confusing, because of his inclination to go from one thing to another with no explanation whatsoever about the connections between the events and ideas he is talking about. It makes the history of firemen very hard to understand. Beatty’s story begins with the idea of photography, film, and television making it possible to present information in a faster, visual, and understandable form. This made the slower practice of reading long, time consuming books not popular and unwanted. Another, part of his argument is that the spread of literacy, and the huge expand in published materials, cause pressure for books to be more like one another and better to read. Beatty later argues that minorities found so many ideas in books unpleasant that they decided to abandon the idea of reading books and started burning them. He brings up minorities having an issue with books when he says, “Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn…show more content…
Although, some of his arguments makes sense, censorship played a huge role in why the books were burned. Books were suppressed and were made unacceptable because of the simple fact that book are biased and they give people thought. They wanted others to have no cause no thought of their own, because they wanted control . The government wanted to be able to control what the people think in order to keep the society healthy and problems free. Beatty demonstrates his fears towards reading books when he uses the analogy, “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon, Breach one man’s mind” (58). He indirectly states that they burn books to prevent people from obtaining the knowledge to rebel against their own society, because a rebellion will destroy all of the work the government has done to make this society

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