Brave New World

Brave New World begins with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. In the year of Our Ford 632, society has finally organized itself according to rational schemas: the birth process has been mechanized, and the different castes of society are conditioned from birth to accept their lot in life. There's no need for repression and persecution and all the other apparatus of a security state if the population has been biologically bent into shape since birth and chemically conditioned thereafter. The first two chapters are a fairly straightforward walkthrough of this human factory, making sure the reader understands the technical foundation of this society and setting the stage for the human drama to come. Chapter 3 continues this walkthrough and, startlingly, diverges into a section where the narrative switches ever more rapidly between different viewpoints. The main characters of the book are introduced here, in a stylistic blowout that is not repeated.

The human story of Brave New World centres on Bernard Marx, a man who doesn't fit into his strictly controlled and pacified world. He is an Alpha, the highest caste in society (Epsilons being the lowest), but he is still not content. He takes Lenina, a woman who firmly believes in the status quo, for a vacation at a Reservation (for people living in a non-chemically-controlled state) in New Mexico, where they meet a young man referred to as the Savage. (Huxley, 10)

The Savage is a sympathetic character, and we often identify most with him when he lashes out in despair. For example, his mother, who was stranded in the Reservation and extremely unhappy there, later dies upon her return to civilization, in circumstances which further alienate the Savage. He tries to interrupt the distribution of soma (a powerful drug with no physically harmful side effects) to a group of Deltas (Chapter XV), vainly. His choices near the end shift into the bizarre, and we get a disturbing glimpse into a mind collapsing into itself under unrelenting pressures. We begin by liking Marx, the man who brought the Savage into contact with the corrosive forces of "civilization," but he too shows his true colours when he decides to bow to the World Controller's will. And perhaps he is only to be pitied in that his choices have been so thoroughly shaped by society, in the end, much the same way as Lenina. Lenina is ...