Brave New World: trama e analisi

Un breve saggio in inglese sui principali temi trattati ne "Brave New World" di Aldous Huxley, con collegamenti alla trama e ai protagonisti (1 pagine formato doc)

Appunto di andreazambo

BRAVE NEW WORLD TRAMA

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (Aldous Huxley).

Brave New World is a dystopian novel, which means that it is a literary work opposite of a utopian work, in that rather than pointing to a perfect world which could act as a source of inspiration for the improvement of present-day conditions, it projects some features of contemporary society into the future in order to show what ugly consequences they may have unless they are kept under control. In AF 632 (the Year of Our Ford, being counted form the year in which Henry Ford adopted the assembly line and started the production of his T-Model, the first cheap car) Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne (all the inhabitants of “the world state” have names that allude to famous people, such as scientists, philosophers, politicians, etc) obtain permission to visit an Indian reservation in New Mexico, from which they bring back Linda, a middle aged woman who had gone missing during a similar visit 20 years earlier, and her son John, who everyone calls “the Savage”.

Brave new world: riassunto in inglese

BRAVE NEW WORLD ANALYSIS

While Linda in soon removed (since disease and old age do not exist any more, the sight of a woman bearing clear signs of ageing could shock people) and taken to an institution where she is gently suppressed by means of continuous administration of drugs, John, who is a handsome, suntanned blond young man becomes extremely popular (everybody is curious to see someone different) but ends up hating the world his mother came from.

Based on consumerist principles, in fact, its essence is well-expressed by the slogan Community (the individual must contribute to the general well-being), Identity (everyone belongs to his/her specific social class), Stability (society is based on a stable system of castes which cannot be modified). However, this Tyranny is not found unpleasant by anyone, since it is the product of the scientific investigation triggered off by the Nine-Year War, when everyone was so shattered by the destructive power of anthrax bombs as to be perfectly willing to give up personal freedom in return for social stability.

BRAVE NEW WORLD PLOT

The world is now a single state where everything is kept under control by ten world controllers. The state has a stable population of two Billion inhabitants divided into five social classes the highest of which (the Alpha class) consists of tall, strong, intelligent, good-looking individuals who are assigned the most difficult jobs, while the other castes are composed of progressively less skilled beings, who are also weaker, shorter and less intelligent and are destined to take care of unpleasant unskilled manual labour. Social stability is guaranteed by the physical and mental conditioning that all the individuals undergo in the Hatching (foetuses are developed in bottles and decanted when the baby in ready) and Conditioning Centres.