Monday, October 31st
Please go ahead and pick up
the handouts on the back
table and start on your DGP 
Be ready for a spooktacular
day!
Agenda
• DGP/Vocabulary (quiz on Friday
and flashcards for +5)
• Anticipation Guide
• Intro to Brave New World (BNW)
and satire (YAY!)
• Exposition explanation
• Radio Broadcast
Anticipation Guide
• Complete the anticipation guide
handout from the back table.
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
A satirical
piece of
fiction, not
scientific
prophecy
Satire:
• A piece of literature designed to
ridicule the subject of the work.
• While satire can be funny, its aim
is not to amuse, but to arouse
contempt.
• Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and
several other techniques are
almost always present.
• As satire, the book’s purpose is to
examine the failings of man’s
behavior in order to encourage him
to reform.
• It may be painful to recognize
today’s faults through the literature.
• Pain and growth are part of the
human condition, and prove that
Huxley’s prophesies have not come
true.
• Many of the cultural concerns seen
in the novel are still matters of
great importance. In the years
since Huxley first published this
book, some of his prophesies seem
far more plausible than they did in
1932.
• Brave New World is an unsettling,
loveless and even sinister place
• “Reading Brave New World
elicits the same disturbing
feelings in the reader which the
society it depicts has
vanquished.”
What does this mean?
This novel presents a world …
• … of sexual promiscuity
• … with a drug culture in the most literal
sense of the word
• … in which the traditional family has
been rendered taboo
• … in which religion has been reduced to
rituals of physical expression
• … in which art panders to the
sensations of mass communications
• … in which the positive values of
western democracy have been
converted into a rigid caste system
• Huxley exploits anxieties
about Soviet Communism
and American capitalism.
• The price of universal
happiness will be the
sacrifice of honored
shibboleths of our culture:
“motherhood,” “home,”
“family,” “freedom,” even
“love.”
• Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of
Western Europe, governs a society where all
aspects of an individual's life are determined
by the state, beginning with conception and
conveyor-belt reproduction.
• A government bureau, the Predestinators,
decides all roles in the hierarchy.
• Children are raised and conditioned by the
state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural
families.
•There are only 10,000 surnames.
• Citizens must not fall in love,
marry, or have their own kids.
• Brave New World, then, is centered
around control and manipulation
• He instills
the fear that a
future world
state may rob
us of the right
to be
unhappy.
• time and
place
written: 1931,
England
• date of first
publication:
1932
• settings
(place):
England,
Savage
Reservation
in New
Mexico
• settings (time): 2540 AD;
referred to in the novel as 632
years AF (“After Ford”), meaning
632 years after production of the
first Model T car
• narrator: Third-person
omniscient
• point of view: Narrated in the
third person from the point of
view of Bernard or John, but also
from the point of view of Lenina,
Helmholtz Watson, and
Mustapha Mond
• Happiness derives from consuming
mass-produced goods, sports such as
Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumblepuppy, promiscuous sex, “the feelies,”
and most famously of all, a supposedly
perfect pleasure-drug, soma.
Soma
• People resort to soma
when they feel depressed,
angry or have negative
thoughts.
• They take it because their
lives, like society itself, are
empty of spirituality or
higher meaning.
• Soma keeps the
population comfortable
with their lot in life.
• Soma is a very one-dimensional
euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow
and intellectually uninteresting well-being.
It provides a mindless
“imbecile happiness” - an escapism which
makes people
comfortable with their
lack of freedom.
Why use soma?
• Huxley foresees a culture in which
widespread and addictive use of
drugs offers another way of
assuring a controlled society.
• This is in addition to the pleasure
of frequent and promiscuous
sexual activity, used to distract the
population and dissuade them
from rebelling.
Keep in mind:
• The sole function of pleasure is to
guarantee the happiness in the
Brave New World, and assure a
stable, controllable population
• State-encouraged promiscuity
assures that loyalty to a lover or
family will not undermine one’s
loyalty to the state
This is satire!
• Please keep that
in mind
as you read
• Huxley does not
offer this world
as an ideal
• Huxley seeks
to warn the
reader
against
scientific
utopianism
(impracticable
perfectionism)
• Creative and destructive impulses
have been purged. The capacity for
spirituality has been extinguished.
• Life is nice - but somehow a bit flat.
In the words of the Resident
Controller of Western Europe: "No
pains have been spared to make
your lives emotionally easy - to
preserve you, as far as that is
possible, from having emotions at
all."
Life-long emotional
well-being is not
genetically preprogrammed. It
isn't even assured
from birth by the
soma.
For example,
babies are
traumatized with
electric shock
conditioning.
Toddlers from the lower
orders are terrorized with
loud noises. This sort of
aversion-therapy serves
to condition them against
liking books.
We are told the inhabitants of the Brave
New World are happy. Yet they
experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings
and emotions.
• The Brave New World is a
totalitarian welfare-state.
• There is no war, poverty or
crime.
• Society is genetically
predestined by caste. Alphas,
the most intellectual, are the
top-dogs. Gammas, Deltas and
Epsilons toil away at the
bottom. The lower orders are
necessary because Alphas,
even when they take soma,
could never be happy doing
menial jobs.
• BNW is set in the year 632 AF (After
Ford). Its biotechnology is highly
advanced.
•Yet the society itself
has no historical
dynamic: “History is
bunk.” In this utopia,
knowledge of the past
is banned by the
Controllers.
• The Brave New World
is not an exciting place
to live in.
• It is geared to the
consumption of massproduced goods:
“Ending is better than
mending.”
• Society is shaped by a
single political
ideology. The motto of
the world state is
“Community, Identity,
Stability.”
• There is no depth of
feeling, no growth of
ideas, and no artistic
creativity.
• Individuality is
suppressed. Intellectual
discovery has been
abolished.
•Clones, the BNW inhabitants, are laboratorygrown and bottled from the hatchery.
•They are conditioned and brainwashed, even
in their sleep. They are never educated to
prize thinking for themselves.
What do you think serves as
the narrative hook in this
novel? the conflict?
• We will meet Bernard Marx, who
will show that human imperfection
has not been completely eliminated
• We will meet John the Savage, who
belongs to neither the progressive
Brave New World or to a traditional
society
• This novel is more applicable today than
it was in 1932. This is a time of:
propaganda,
censorship,
conformity, genetic
engineering, social
conditioning, and
mindless
entertainment.
• This was what Huxley
saw in our future. His
book is a warning.
Do we have a modern soma?
• Consider the number of ads
for prescription drugs,
which are permitted only
in the United States and
New Zealand
• Doctors and consumer
advocates believe these
ads drive up health-care
costs and seduce millions
into asking their MDs for
drugs they don’t need for
diseases they had never
before heard of, like
restless leg syndrome
Whatever is wrong,
there’s a drug for you,
or so TV ads say
Catching patients’ eyes
• Lipitor: Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor
of the artificial heart, rowing on a
beautiful lake
• Lamisil: ugly yellow creatures
tucking themselves under your
toenails
• Lunesta: a luna moth
• In 2005, drug companies spent more
than $4 billion on what is termed
direct-to-consumer advertising,
according to the Government
Accountability Office.
• That is about 1/7 of the amount the
companies spent on research and
development
•Nearly 1/3 of that TV ad
money was for what type of
medication?
Sleeping aids
Gauging ads’ impact
• 78 percent of MDs said patients
asked them to prescribe drugs
they had seen on TV
• Patients most often asked for
advertised drugs for acid reflux,
impotence, allergies and insomnia,
the mainstay of TV ad lineups
•
Source: Consumer Reports survey of doctors on direct-to-consumer advertising
Essential Questions to connect
the literature to today’s culture:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Is it better to be free than to be happy?
Is freedom compatible with happiness?
Is the collective more important than the individual?
Can children be taught effectively to think in only one
certain way?
Can young people be taught so well that they never
question their teachings later?
Is stability more important than freedom?
Can alterations made by advanced science to
mankind be made permanent at the DNA-level?
Can mankind be conditioned by science?
Should the individual be limited/controlled for the
greater good? If so, how much?
“Universal happiness
keeps the wheels steadily turning;
truth and beauty can’t.” Aldous
Huxley
"The books we need are of the kind
that act upon us like a misfortune,
that make us suffer like the death
of someone we love more
than ourselves, that make us feel
as though we were on the verge
of suicide or lost in a forest
remote from all human habitation –
a book should serve as the ax
for the frozen sea within us."
Franz Kafka
Now let’s get
into the text!
You have 25 on-task
reading points with this
text as well. Stay focused!
Stay awake! Keep your
head up!
Function of Exposition
Writing
• The first part of the plot: introduction to
characters, setting and situation
• The audience needs background
information
• Inform the reader of what they are about
to encounter
• Examples of expositions?
Gilligan’s Island
The Brady Bunch
Radio Broadcast
• Listen along with the radio
broadcast to complete the
supplementary handout.
• This broadcast is an introduction
into the Brave New World!