Brave New World: Unveiling a Dystopian Society's Irony and Conformity | Teen Ink

Brave New World: Unveiling a Dystopian Society's Irony and Conformity

March 8, 2024
By TristanLyu GOLD, Beijing, Other
TristanLyu GOLD, Beijing, Other
12 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Aldous Leonard Huxley was a twentieth-century English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly fifty books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems. Brave New World, a dystopian novel, is one of his most renowned works, in which Huxley makes use of irony to establish a world where people have their own rules, leading his readers to ponder what the civilized society is.

 

The novel starts with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, in which the Director explains the foundational ideas of society’s “stability,” which stems from the production-line uniformity of its citizens. People in the World State are literally factory-made. They are then being assigned to one of five different castes: alphas (the top members of society), followed by Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and finally Epsilons. This caste system was created by the ten “World Controllers.” After the foundation of society is introduced and explained, Huxley shifts gears into the main plot of the novel, which revolves around the characters, Lenina Crowne, a Beta who works as a nurse at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and Bernard Marx, an Alpha who works in the Psychology Bureau. As the two of them are about to leave for a trip to Malpais, the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, Bernard learns that the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is planning to ship him off to Iceland, thinking his coworkers were corrupt.

While Bernard and Lenina are in New Mexico, they meet a strange man named John, dressed in the manner of the savages, but clearly a white man, fluent in English. Bernard convinces Mond to allow him to bring Linda and John back to civilization for scientific purposes. As they arrive back in London, Bernard humiliates the D.H.C. with what he had discovers, and his social status so long in abeyance, finally skyrocketed to where he thought it should had been all along. He parades John around society parties. However, John has fallen in love with Lenina and has became obsessed with her, tortured by the free love she seems willing to give, which does not align with the monogamous conception of love he grew up with. He becames depressed and refuses to accompany Bernard any longer, effectively ruining Bernard’s newly gained social standing. 

Also, I would like to read more books not only about dystopia but also the science-fictional books, because they are interesting and attractive to me is because it sometimes included things from the real world but also have imagined objects and events. Most of novels can attract me more than the non-fictional books because the plot and the settings in the novels are more connected to each other than the non-fiction books. Also, the novels usually have a world that is imagined by the author, and can make it more interesting, while the non-fiction books will only be able to write about the facts and things happening in the real world.


The author's comments:

This is the book report of the book Brave New World.


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