The Structure of Brave New World

As a writer, Huxley refused to be kept to simple, chronological structure in his fiction. He characteristically experiments with structure, surprising his reader by juxtaposing two different conversations or point of view. In Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley even attempted to break out of traditional narrative structure altogether — to make fiction imitate the flow of musical counterpoint.

In Brave New World, Huxley's plan to create a futuristic world and then to introduce John the Savage as an outsider demanded another kind of unconventional structure. To achieve his effect, Huxley divides the novel roughly into thirds. The first part of the novel establishes the dystopia — the London of the future — with enough detail and background to encourage the reader to accept the world as a given. The second part plunges the reader into a thoroughly different world — the Savage Reservation — to experience the shock of the London characters who are traveling there as tourists. The central part also introduces the real main character, John, in the only world he has known since birth. The third part unfolds the events of John's life in London and his challenge of the dystopia.

Huxley's structuring of Brave New World defies the conventions of both mainstream and utopian fiction. In most traditional utopian novels, the utopia itself stands more or less alone as a setting, with no distracting side-trips to other places. The only contrast to the utopia, then, is the reader's own culture and society. But in introducing the Savage Reservation, Huxley introduces another fictional world — a rival and contrast to his dystopia within the novel itself.

According to convention, the inclusion of the Savage Reservation should blur the clarity of the world of London. But Huxley manages to bring his dystopia into even sharper focus with the trip to the Savage Reservation. Both worlds emerge as believable and horrifying, each in its own way.

By holding the introduction of his main character until the middle of the novel, Huxley also flouts narrative convention. In this, Huxley uses the reader's expectations about structure to produce a particular effect. Since convention dictates that the main character appear very early in the novel, readers frequently become convinced that Bernard Marx will be at the center of the plot and theme. Just when Bernard proves himself cowardly and weak, despite his rebelliousness, Huxley offers John, the real main character.

Compared to Bernard, John appears truly heroic, at least initially, and, as a "savage," introduces a new perspective that Huxley uses upon the return to London. In bringing John into a dystopia already familiar to the reader, Huxley can play the reader's knowledge against the character's innocence. And the effect of this irony — Huxley's strong point — intensifies the climax and conclusion of Brave New World.

Book Summary

Brave New World opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future ("After Ford"). Human life has been almost entirely industrialized — controlled by a few people at the top of a World State.

The first scene, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned according to the society's strict caste system, establishes the antiseptic tone and the theme of dehumanized life. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in this world.

Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus (or high-caste) psychologist, emerges as the single discontented person in a world where material comfort and physical pleasure — provided by the drug soma and recreational sex — are the only concerns. Scorned by women, Bernard nevertheless manages to engage the attention of Lenina Crowne, a "pneumatic" beauty who agrees to spend a vacation week with him at the remote Savage Reservation in New Mexico, a place far from the controlled, technological world of London.

Before Bernard leaves, his superior, the D.H.C., spontaneously reveals that long ago he, too, visited the Savage Reservation, and he confesses in sorrow that he lost the woman who accompanied him there. Embarrassed by the disclosure of his socially unacceptable emotion, the D.H.C. turns on Bernard, threatening him with banishment for his own social sins — not engaging enthusiastically enough in sex and soma.

In the Savage Reservation with Lenina, Bernard meets a woman from London who gave birth to a son about 20 years before. Seeing his opportunity to gain power over the D.H.C. — the father of the child — Bernard brings Linda and John back to London and presents them publicly to the D.H.C., who is about to banish Bernard.

Shocked and humiliated by the proof of his horrifying connection with natural birth, the D.H.C. flees in terror. Once a social outcast, Bernard now enjoys great success, because of his association with the new celebrity — John, called "the Savage."

Reared on the traditional ways of the Reservation and an old volume of the poetry of Shakespeare, John finds London strange, confusing, and finally repellent. His quotation of Miranda's line from The Tempest — "O brave new world / That has such people in it" — at first expresses his awe of the "Other Place" his mother told him of as a child. But the quotation becomes ironic as John becomes more and more disgusted by the recreational sex, soma, and identical human beings of London.

Lenina's attempted seduction provokes John's anger and violence, and, later, the death of Linda further arouses his fury. At last, John's attempt to keep a crowd of Deltas from their ration of soma results in a riot and his arrest, along with Bernard and Helmholtz Watson, an "emotional engineer" who wishes to be a poet.

The three face the judgment of World Controller Mustapha Mond, who acknowledges the flaws of this brave new world, but pronounces the loss of freedom and individuality a small price to pay for stability. Mond banishes Bernard and Helmholtz to the Falkland Islands and rules that John must stay in London.

When his two friends leave for their exile, John determines to make a retreat for himself in a remote, secluded lighthouse outside the city. There he tries to purify himself of civilization with ritual whippings and vomiting.

Drawn by the spectacle of his wild penances, reporters and crowds press in on John, who becomes a public curiosity — a kind of human animal in a zoo. When Lenina appears in the crowd, John furiously attacks her with the whip. John's frenzy inflames the crowd, and, in accordance with their social training, the violence turns into a sexual orgy, with John drawn in more or less unwillingly.

The next day, when John awakes from the effects of the soma, he realizes in horror what he has done. The novel closes on an image of John's body, hanging lifeless from a wooden beam in his lighthouse retreat.

[1] The Director of Hatchery and Conditioning Centre

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1231