"Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising. The smile on Bernard Marx's face was contemptuous." Brave New World 39 Aldous Huxley.
An interesting quote from this book that in a way betrays the archetypes of novels, in this story the villains are the heroes, or it would be more correct to say that the heroes of the story are the villains of the world. The world in the brave new world is very different from the one we live in, this world values "stability" more so than freedom, and "everyone belongs to everyone else" (102) there is a kind of collective whole which society today lacks, and despite how absolutely horrible its immediate reception is to the reader, the 6 year old's doing "erotic play", one can easily find and believe in its positives, and that I feel is one of Brave New Worlds greatest strengths as a novel. That the world is so real, that the world makes so much sense that could be our world in 700 years, 200 years hell 50 years and that world seems so realistic so very possible. So what makes the setting so flawlessly realistic I wonder, how does Huxley capture humanity so well?
Huxley seems to have an uncanny understanding of people, not people as an individual but people as as group, how he came across this, i don't know but its there and it allows for an incredibly insightful book. That in turn lets the novel ask some very deep questions, like the ones in this world, what is better happiness or liberty. The question isn't so much one of the story as that is left until much later then what I am inferring, but one for the reader, what's better. From the beginning of the book the question is prevalent in everything, when the story starts in the Hatchery and Conditioning centre the reader is shown horror upon horror of the new world and yet it still manages to seem not to awful, in fact some of it seems pretty good.
From the beginning of the story, in the hatchery and conditioning centre, the brave new world is there, right from the beginning does the setting scream hey, this is different and the reader will see it. The brave new world is introduced to the reader via a school classroom trip, that at first seems quite normal, but slowly the world unfurls and the reader comes to realize how outside the norm even that class of children is (they are a class of twins, all the same), and the reader is allowed to see a very impressive portrayal of humanity, and what we might, might be heading towards, and that is so terribly real that I think the setting of this book is just fantastic.
"An interesting quote from this book that in a way betrays the archetypes of novels, in this story the villains are the heroes, or it would be more correct to say that the heroes of the story are the villains of the world.". . . "From the beginning of the story, in the hatchery and conditioning centre, the brave new world is there, right from the beginning does the setting scream hey, this is different and the reader will see it."
ReplyDeleteRead this out loud. What do you mean? Did you say what you meant to say?
"there is a kind of collective whole which society today lacks" - on what basis do you claim this?
"That the world is so real, that the world makes so much sense that could be our world in 700 years, 200 years hell 50 years and that world seems so realistic so very possible." - does the diction suit the audience or the purpose?