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Brave New World - Referat
BRAVE NEW WORLD
by Aldous Huxley
The charecters:
D. H. C. – Director of Hatching and Conditioning
Henry Foster – working at the Central London Hatching and Conmditioning Centre
Lenina Crowne – colleague of henry; at the moment going out with Henry
Bernhard Marx – Alpha Plus, outsider of society
John – a savage; coming from the reservations into the new world
Linda – his mother
About the Author:
Aldous Huxley was born on the 26th od July in 1894 in Godalming/Surrey. He came of a family of brilliant scientists. He was educated in Eton and attended Oxfort university. He was to have been a doctor, but he soon gave up his studies.
The use of science in the 1st World War caused him great distress, as did the spread of political systems which, it seemed to him, would take away the right of individuals to think and act for themselves.
The book, a utopia, is a satire on life and first appeared in 1932. After the 2nd World War the book was reprinted and Huxley was asked to write an introduction. At the end of this he said: „All things considered, it looks as though Utopia were far close to us than anyone. Only 15 years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it 600 years into the future. Today it seems possible that the horror may be on us in a single century.“
In that same period of time Huxley published another book Brave New World Resisted, which contains further thoughts on the problems that now face the people of the world. Huxley died in 1963.
About the book:
In Brave new World Huxley gives a picture of life as it might be imagined to be in another six centuries.
All human values seemed ti have changed. Family life has dissapeared. Human beings are produces in bottles instead of being born in the natural way.
The egg is taken from a woman, who is paid six month’ extra salary, by operation, then fertilised and gets a special treatment called the Brokanovsky’y Process, where the egg is divided into 96 eggs, each of them growing into an embryo and later on into a full-sized adult.
All people have their given place in society, they are divided into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, according to their qualitiy and knowledge and the need of society. Plus and Minus are used with the letters to give grades between them. Alpha Plus is the highest and Epsilon Minus the lowest.
Then the embryos get special treatment according to what they are going to be as a human being, for example: Later on chemical workers are trained to endure without harm great quantities of substances usually dangerous to health.
All that kind of training aims at that: making people like their unavidable place in society. Babies and children are being sleep-tought to lern all they would need in the shortest amount of time.
Natural things have been replaced by artificial things. People do not suffer, their lives are planned from start to finish. They know nothing about passion, joy and sorrow, history and literature. People don’t even know what it is to have a mother or a father, they think of it as something disgusting. ……………………….[page 19: He couldn’t….]
People don’t marry either. They are used to have one-night-stands. Therefore Lenina is a popular young woman, because she has spent a night with almost all of the men id the centre where she’s working.
People don’t feel sorry about death. It’s just happening and no one cares, because it belongs to what they are used to, what they were being taught.
People get a certain kind of drug, which is called soma. It is an Indian drug, used in certain Hindu religious ceremonies. Huxley makes soma a necessity fpr everybody in the new world because it makes them feel continually satisfied with their lives.
In the new world the god to be worshipped is Henry Ford, who founded the 1st factory for the production of cheap cars at Detroit. The cross is the sign of the Christian faith, the “T” is the sign for their kind of religion, used in the new world, for Henry Ford’s first car being produced was called “Model T”.
Community, Identity, Stability are the three essential points in the society of the new world. Community means giving up one’s individual belifes; Identity is the state of being exactly like everybody else; Stability is the state where people think that changes or revolutions are impossible.
In the book the reader is shown 2 extremes, the life of primitive tribes and the artificial life of a world controlled by science.
The Story:
Henry Foster and Lenina Crowne are working at the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre, in the Fertilising Room and in the Bottling Room. They have been going out for four months.
Knowing that this is quite a long time of going out with the same guy, Lenina decides to accept the invitation of Bernard to accompany him to the reservations, where the uncivilised people, the savages, are living as primitive tribes.
Bernard is an Alpha Plus, but a little bit too small, to individual and a little bit different from all the others, for being an Alpha Plus…………[p. 36]……………..When he gets the permit to go to the reservation, the D.H.C. tells him, he went there, too, a long time ago. He lost his girlfriend during a thunderstorm and she was never found again.
At the reservation, also called Malpais, which is French and means bad country, Lenina is shocked about the rituals the savages, the Indians, are practising. They are living in dirt, they are giving birth to their children, feeding them by breast, and so on.
Then Bernard and Lenina meet a young man, John, and his mother Linda, who apparently seem to belong to the savages, but don’t look like them. The colour of their hair and skin is lighter than the Indians’. Lind tells Lenina and Bernard their story: Linda got lost during a thunderstorm and was found by the savages, who took care of her and the baby she was about to give birth to. She never got used to that kind of life and both of them never have been fully accepted in the community of the Indians.
Bernard and Lenina take John and Linda back to the new world, for it’s apparently that John is the D.H.C.’s son. Back home Linda becomes addicted to soma and soon dies, which couses John sorrow, that no one would understand. ……[p. 91]
John doesn’t get along with the world his mother had described him as to be so beautiful. John falls in love with Lenina, who wants to spend a night with him, but refuses for it’s not that what love is meant to be. John calls her a prostitute.
Because of John Bernard seems to be dangerous for society and is therefore sent to some island as punishment.
John starts a new life on his own in an non-used air-lighthouse, where he’s soon found by the press and all the people, who want to see the savage practising his weird rituals like whipping himself. One day Lenina comes with the crowd and John gets mad at her and starts whipping her, for she doesn’t understand his great feelings for her.
The next day when the visitors are looking for John thy find him hanging in the lighthouse. He had hung himselfe. ………[p. 123]
John didn’t belomg to the Indians, he was never fully accepted there, but he didn’t belong to the new world either.
You may find it interesting, perhaps even alarming, to consider how many things described in fun in Brave New World have already come true in our ordinary lives. That is what Huxley wanted us to do when he wrote the book, to think about these things before it is too late.
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