Brave New World - Aurora High School

1 Brave New Worldby Aldous HuxleyAll new material 2008 Inc. or its Licensors. All Rights portion may be reproduced without permission in writing from the complete copyright information please see the online version of this text of Huxley and 1 Summary and 2 Summary and 3 Summary and 4 Summary and 5 Summary and 6 Summary and 7 Summary and 8 Summary and 9 Summary and 10 Summary and 11 Summary and 12 Summary and 13 Summary and 14 Summary and 15 Summary and 16 Summary and 17 Summary and 18 Summary and 1 Questions and 2 Questions and 3 Questions and 4 Questions and 5 Questions and 6 Questions and 7 Questions and 8 Questions and 9 Questions and 10 Questions and 11

2 Questions and 12 Questions and 13 Questions and 14 Questions and 15 Questions and 16 Questions and 17 Questions and 18 Questions and of and Unique Setting of Huxley's s Brave New World as Social Irritant: Ban It or Buy It?..90 End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley s Brave New Essay Essay and for Further Do I Read Next?..107 Bibliography and Further in 1931 and published the following year, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a dystopian oranti-utopian novel. In it, the author questions the values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray afuturistic World in which many of the contemporary trends in British and American society have been taken toextremes.

3 Though he was already a best-selling author, Huxley achieved international acclaim with thisnow-classic novel. Because Brave New World is a novel of ideas, the characters and plot are secondary, evensimplistic. The novel is best appreciated as an ironic commentary on contemporary story is set in a London six hundred years in the future. People all around the World are part of atotalitarian state, free from war, hatred, poverty, disease, and pain. They enjoy leisure time, material wealth,and physical pleasures. However, in order to maintain such a smoothly running society, the ten people incharge of the World , the Controllers, eliminate most forms of freedom and twist around many traditionallyheld human values.

4 Standardization and progress are valued above all else. These Controllers create humanbeings in factories, using technology to make ninety-six people from the same fertilized egg and to conditionthem for their future lives. Children are raised together and subjected to mind control through sleep teachingto further condition them. As adults, people are content to fulfill their destinies as part of five social classes,from the intelligent Alphas, who run the factories, to the mentally challenged Epsilons, who do the mostmenial jobs. All spend their free time indulging in harmless and mindless entertainment and sports the Savage, a man from the uncontrolled area of the World (an Indian reservation in New Mexico)comes to London, he questions the society and ultimately has to choose between conformity and life in 1932 was very different from American life.

5 Almost an entire generation of men had been lostin World War I. Oxford University enrollment was only 491 in 1917, down from 3,181 in 1914. Among manyof the upper-class poets and writers of the time sometimes called the Auden Generation, after the poet W. there was a sense of disillusionment and futility. Britain s foreign investments had been depleted bywar debts and loans. Higher living standards, prices, wages, and taxes became the order of the day in post-warBritain. By 1922 overpopulation had caused passage of the Empire Settlement Act to encourage and financesettlement in the 1920s were also years of mass unemployment, and the Communist Soviet Union was making inroads intothe labor movement.

6 After many wars, those on the homefront who had sacrificed for the war effort felt theydeserved their just 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model-T, in any color you choose so long as it s black. In 1914, heopened his Highland Park, Michigan factory, equipped with the first electric conveyor belt assembly line. AModel-T could now be assembled in 93 minutes. Consequently, Ford had 45 percent of the new automobilemarket. He paid his workers the highest wages in the industry a whopping five dollars a day. In return, hedemanded that his workers live by his standards: wives were not to work or take in boarders, employees werenot to drink in local bars, and families were to attend church each Sunday.

7 He sent men out into the workers neighborhoods to make sure his rules were being followed. Ford was considered a bigot and was alsoparanoid; he feared for his family s lives. By creating Greenfield Village near Detroit, he tried to recaptureand reproduce what he viewed as a simple, happy past the good old , science not only gave man a better knowledge of his World , and the technology to make living easier, but it also gave him new means of destroying himself. The same gasoline engine used to propel automobilesand trains was reinvented for use in airplanes that could drop bombs as early as World War I. Science andtechnology together began recreating industry, which for more people than Henry Ford meant bigger profitsand , the advent of electrical lighting in both home and factory created shift work, which of course,interferes with established biological rhythms.

8 Electricity also created a brighter night-life with morepossibilities, and it gave the middle and upper classes new appliances to make living easier and assembly lines, with their shift work, forced workers to meet the demands of both man and could spend an entire shift in one place along the assembly line, repeating the same action again andagain. Thus, a worker answered to two bosses one human, one mechanical. Only one understood pain andfatigue, however, and only one could stop the other. Consequently, most workers were more likely to bedriven by machines than to actually drive was the newly mechanized, scientific, controlled World which became the model for Huxley s BraveNew World , which one critic regarded as an exercise in pessimistic prognostication, a terrifying Utopia.

9 In 1958, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he discussed what he perceived as the threats tohumanity that had developed since the publication of his novel in 1932. These threats were overpopulation,propaganda, scientific advancement, and his belief that man must not give up his freedom for the unthinkingease of a life organized by the power of a few over the masses. This was something that had happened inGermany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China since saw scientific progress as a vain deceit which would produce a World with no joy one in whichendeavors are frustrated and sexual satisfaction becomes ashes. Brave New World is the utopian nightmare ofscientific deceit, unlike the futuristic novels of H.

10 G. Wells whose optimism held that man falls to rise of CharactersThe Director In charge of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. He has a secret to Foster A Supervisor in the London Hatchery. He loves facts, figures, and Mond The Resident Controller for Western Europe. He is one of ten Controllers in the World . Hepossesses some of the now forbidden books, like the Bible and the works of Crowne A Beta Nurse in the Hatchery. She is well-conditioned to this New World until she meetsthe Marx An Alpha-Plus expert in hypnopaedia who does not meet the physical standards of his thus yearns for acceptance, which he hopes the Savage will grant Crowne A friend of Lenina, but not related.