In the aftermath of World War I, the general mood was to wipe out the bitter past and seek out a utopian society. When Huxley wrote the novel in , he took much of his contemporary society and presented it in extreme form, creating a world ruled by totalitarianism, deification of science, and emotional engineering. The inspiration for the content of the novel came from the leaders of the day, including Karl Marx, Henry Ford, and Sigmund Freud.
John the Savage The protagonist of the novel who represents the author's viewpoint. He was born and brought up on a Reservation.
Though fathered by the Director, he has a beta-minus for a mother. Fully conversant with the traditions and values of the old world, he is the major spokesperson for the new one. Bernard Marx A worker who is attached to the Psychology Bureau. From the beginning he is singled out for his looks as well as his behavior. Like the brightly colored Soma pills, the activities designed to help the residents of New London keep sadness at bay are the only sets that incorporate vibrant hues.
The ultimate resource for design industry professionals, brought to you by the editors of Architectural Digest. Ultimately, the setting of this story—and the way it is dismantled—is central to the lesson at hand. This show is luckily really relevant and also at the same time unfortunately really relevant.
How does Bernard take advantage of John? What happens to John before and after the death of Linda? What issues does John debate with Helmholtz and Mustapha, the Controller? Literary Devices Setting. Previous section Antagonist Next section Genre. Popular pages: Brave New World.
Although set in the future, then, Huxley's Brave New World is truly a novel of its time. At a period of great change, Huxley creates a world in which all the present worrying trends have produced terrible consequences. Movement toward socialism in the s, for example, becomes, in Huxley's future, the totalitarian World State.
Questioning of religious beliefs and the growth of materialism, likewise, transforms into a religion of consumerism with Henry Ford as its god. And if Model T's roll off the assembly line in the present, in a stream of identical cars, then in the future, human beings will be mass-produced, too. Huxley's future vision, by turns witty and disturbing, imagines the end of a familiar, traditional life and the triumph of all that is new and strange in the modern world.
In constructing an imaginary world, Huxley contributes to a long tradition — the utopian fiction. More used his fictional Utopia to point out the problems present in his own society. Since then, writers have created utopias to challenge readers to think about the underlying assumptions of their own culture. Gulliver's Travels , by Jonathan Swift, seems at first to be a book of outlandish travel stories.
Yet throughout the narratives, Swift employs his fictional worlds ironically to make serious arguments about the injustices of his own Britain. In utopian fiction, imagination becomes a way to explore alternatives in political, social, and religious life. In Huxley's time, the most popular writer of utopian fiction was H.
Wells held an optimistic view of the future, with an internationalist perspective, and so his utopias reflected the end of national divisions and the growth of a truly humane civilization, as he saw it.
When Huxley read Wells' Men Like Gods , he was inspired to make fun of its optimism with his characteristically ironic wit. What began as a parody turned into a novel of its own — Brave New World.
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