Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Take home essay on Brave New World

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”(― Oscar Wilde) People often live life, do the bare minimum, just enough to get by. The novel "Brave New World" serves the idea that where you live affects who you are, and who you are, defines what you know, and what you don't know.
The world you live in can cause you to have a type of mood toward your life. In Brave New World, John was a character that was just highlighted to me with this point. This man was in a dark place from the very start. He seemed to want to die, wasn't an extremely happy person. To add to the sense of distress in his life, he begins to be alienated by the savage, and the "civilized" world. This affects John in such a way that it pulls him further into his distress.
In the beginning of the book we begin seeing Bernard as the main character. Knowing that Brave New World was written as a prediction, or warning of what Aldux Huxley saw the world leading to, it was semi difficult to see where exactly Huxley was going with the setting of this human created world, surrounded around scientists idea of a European society. However when Bernard fades behind the, and John becomes the light, it shows exactly where Huxley was going with this.
Huxley shows that we may have the idea that we have this society we live in is as good as it is going to get with where we are, but that's not the reality. The reality is, is that people are being slowly isolated away from what the truth is. With our isolation from what the truth is, we are alienated from the world just as John was. The novel ends with John committing suicide. With isolation from the reality of the world, people end up dead without purpose. He died because he didn't have the needed attention from other humans sending him into such a state that caused him to commit suicide.
Huxley's point with writing this novel was to show his prediction or warning of where he saw the world heading. Through alienation from the world, can lead to death. Maybe not physical death, but even mental death. A mental death that make you feel not only alone, but unaware of the reality of what's going on in the world around you. Hopefully it doesn't end in a demise such as John's, but who's choice is that?

No comments:

Post a Comment