BRAVE NEW FUTURE
BY: K Y L E V.
ALDOUS HUXLEY:
*Born in Godalming, Surrey, United Kingdom on July 26 th, 1894 and died in
Los Angeles , California on November 22nd, 1963.
*When he was 14 he was diagnosed with keratitis punctata which blinded
him for three years
*After he recovered from his illness Aldous studied English Literature and
graduated from Balliol University in Oxford with first class honors
*He had three brothers, two of which were very successful biologists while
the other one committed suicide due to depression.
WORKS:
Ends and Means - 1937
The Perennial Philosophy - 1945
After Many a Summer - 1939
Brave New World - 1932
*Aldous is also known for his work on a handful of movies such as Madame
Curie (1943), Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Jane Eyre (1944)
*He also attempted to write a synopsis for Alice in Wonderland but was shot
down by Walt Disney because he couldn’t understand his work
SETTING:
*The setting of Brave New World begins In London some 600 years into the
future in a Utopia of technology called the World State which is a
Government ruled city controlled by ten world leaders, aside from the
technologically advanced and clean streets of the World State there are
Reservations that are home to savages who live in a basic world of
disease, poverty, and ancient religion surrounded by electrical fences to
keep them contained.
CHARACTERS:
*The Director of Conditioning is a intelligent self centered man who traveled to a
savage reservation when he was younger with Linda who was left behind and
gave birth to their child John.
*Linda is a beta Minus who was left by mistake at a savage reservation when she fell
into a ravine, she was later discovered and was forced to grow old at the
reservation with her son John.
*John the savage was born on a reservation to Linda and the director of Conditioning,
his mother taught him how to read and write by giving him a book of
Shakespeare. He is very poetic and conservative when it comes to relationships.
*Lenina Crowne is a young attractive girl with lupus, who tries desperately to
understand and date John
*Helmholtz Watson is an intelligent and attractive writer who is successful in sports
and women, he is also a rebel and nonconformist who wishes to write how he
truly feels.
*Bernard Marx is a very intelligent alpha who doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of his
caste because he is small, unhappy, solitary, and dislikes sports which causes
people to think that to much alcohol was put into his bottle when he was an
embryo.
*The Controller or Mustapha Mond is a extremely intelligent scientist who is one of
the ten world leaders, he is educated in philosophy and history and has read the
bible along with Shakespeare giving him a broad view on life compared to other
leaders and lower castes.
PLOT:
In
Brave New World humans are no longer born, they are cloned
and breed in test tubes that go threw an array of assembly
lines to be conditioned mentally, physically, and chemically to
be molded into five separate castes that make up the society
of the World State. These five castes are Alphas, Betas,
Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons with Alphas being the most
intelligent and Epsilons being the least intelligent. Each caste
is conditioned in a different way for example if they are going
to be chemical workers then they will be conditioned to be
immune to a smorgasbord of chemicals and if they are steel
workers then they will be conditioned to deal with extreme
heat. In this refined world everyone is happy and if they start
to feel depressed then they take SOMA which is essentially a
sedative that makes you high or in their terms go on vacation.
PLOT CONTINUED:
This story starts off in the life of Bernard Marx who is an Alpha caste member, but Bernard
is different because he is small and skinny causing him to become an outcast who is
made fun of on a daily basis, with rumors that there was to much alcohol put into his
bottle when he was cloned. Early on in the story Bernard rebels against the society by
indulging in mother nature atop of a cliff with Lenina and for his actions he is
threatened by the director to be sent to Iceland to be punished and left in isolation, but
Bernard ignores the directors threats and continues to expand his lust for nature. After
being threatened Bernard talks to the director about traveling to a savage reservation
with Lenina, the director breaks down and tells Bernard how he once visited a
reservation with a women when he was younger but he somehow lost her and had to
come back without her. At the reservation they meet a light skinned savage named
John and an overweight wrinkled skinned women named Linda who tells them that she
was the women the director left behind and that John was their child. After finding the
directors son, Bernard travels back to London and gets permission from the controller
to bring John and Linda back. Once they arrive in London John becomes a star, causing
Bernard to become some what arrogant and popular for a short period of time until the
savage gets tired of meeting new people causing Bernard to be shot back into the past
of being ignored. Linda on the other hand locks herself in her room and repeatedly
doses herself with soma to forget her horrible past on the reservation until she dies.
The death of his mother causes the savage to cry and revolt with anger by disrupting
the distribution of soma to lower caste members, which results in a huge riot causing
John, Bernard, and Helmholtz to be arrested. Once they were arrested the controller
confronts them and sends Bernard to Iceland, Helmholtz to the Falkland Islands, but
he releases John and allows him to stay in London. But John wasn’t happy with his life
in London so he decided to live a hermits life in a quite place where he was visited and
criticized by Utopians day in and day out until one day his crush Lenina joined in on the
cruel bashing causing John to end his life.
CRITIQUE:
*Overall I thought the book was pretty interesting because it depicts a cruel
reality of a world ran by a single government dominated by technology.
Also Id like to point out the fact that I didn’t like the book for the first two
chapters but once I started the third it had me hooked and I couldn’t put
it down.