The theme of Huxley’s Brave New World Essay Example For Students

The theme of Huxley’s Brave New World Essay The theme of Huxley’s Brave New World is community, identity, and stability. Each of these three themes represents what a Brave New World society needs to have in order to survive. According to the new world controllers, community is a result of identity and stability, identity is a part of genetic engineering, and stability is what everyone desires to achieve. These themes are represented in the book by the symbolic meaning of the phrase â€Å"Children are from bottles† and the hypnotic phrase â€Å"Everybody belongs to everybody else† (qt. Hazlitt 285). For a better understanding it is useful to explore these themes in detail. Community refers to the thought of one whole unit. Everyone is connected, by their actions toward each other in every day life, sexual desires, and what they do to remove the feeling of horrible emotions. This connectedness and lie, and its effects can be seen in the character of Bernard, a person who hates what society has become. Bernard is disgusted by the thought of â€Å"having anyone† he says, referring to sexual relations with women. Bernard is longing for a sense of individuality which he cannot posses in Brave New World. He emerged with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He is utterly miserable, and perhaps it is his own fault† (Huxley 86, ch. 5). Thereby jeopardizing the stability of the community as a whole, near the end, it was decided that he be banished to the Falkland Islands, so that he could not tell anyone else of his individuality. In Brave New World community is upheld and reinforced at any and all costs. Identity is the one thing that no one person can experience. There is no individual identity in Brave New World. There is only a collective identity which is shared by all members of society. Collective Identity is achieved by forcing everyone in society to conform. It is maintained in society by making someone who has any individuality feel different almost as an outcast. But sometimes as in the case of the character Bernard, people in Brave New World long for their own identity. For example, Bernard was having feelings and thoughts he is not proud of, â€Å"Did you ever feel you had some sort of extra power,† Bernard said to a friend while talking secret (Huxley 69, ch. ). The extra power Bernard is referring to is individuality. This shows that as much as the world controllers try to rob people of their individuality, it cannot be taken away that easily. Stability is a third of these three goals, but it is the one most mentioned in the book. â€Å"The world is stable now. People are happy; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving the way they ought to behave† (Huxley 226, ch. 16). The desire for stability, requires the production of large numbers of genetically identical humans, because people who are exactly the same are less likely to come into conflict. Stability is seen in Brave New World to minimize conflict, risk, and change. Setting plays a particularly important role in Brave New World. The novel opens about six hundred years in the future. Civilization as people know it has ended. There has become a new world state, an all powerful government headed by ten world controllers. Almost all traces of the past have been erased. Faith in Christ has been replaced by faith in the community. The cross has been replaced by the T, and My Life and Work has replaced the bible. â€Å"Religion like genuine learning thrive on sacrifices and passions, which are impossible in a standardized superficial world with its cheap department store happiness† (Hesse 286). But some parts of the world were allowed to remain the same. For example, the savage reservation, the New Mexican home of the Zuni Indians. It is a world away from civilization, the Zunis are still threaten by disease, filth, and religion. A Farewell To Arms Analysis EssayWhen Huxley was sixteen and a student, a sickness made him nearly blind, but he was able to recover enough to attend Oxford university. Huxley graduated Oxford with honors and published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1916. It is during this time that he found a passion for writing. After college, Huxley moved to fascist Italy. His experiences in Italy with the fascist government and its methods reinforced his outlook that the future of society was doomed to a Authoring manner. With this idea in mind Huxley began to write Brave New World. It took only four months for Huxley to write Brave New World. It is important to remember that Huxley wrote Brave new World before the rise of Hitler to power in Germany and before Stalin started killing millions in the Soviet Union. Huxley had then no real life reason to make tyranny and terror major elements in his story. After world war II Huxley said â€Å"The future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal then the future dictatorships† (qtd. Oreston 307). Obviously referring to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin before and after world war two. What Huxley thought to be a overdone look at the future dictatorship’s turned out to be no were as brutal as real life. Suddenly, the story of Brave New World did not seem so much like fiction as it did a window to the future. â€Å"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach† (Huxley qtd. Yonson 3). It is this willingness of man to make the same mistake twice that in 1997 the ideas in Brave New World do not seem that far off base. Most people thought that with the collapse of the Soviet Union it would put an end to the suffering and an all controlling government. But with an influx of clones, test tube babies, government controls of television, needless violence, and the search for the perfect mood altering drug. Who is to say that Brave New World is not earth in fifty years? As more people lose their individuality they become connected with community. It is with this connection that they begin to let others control their lives and humanity is already headed in that direction. Brave New World should not only be seen as a great piece of science fiction. It should be seen as a warning. Of what can happen when people live up to the influence of outside sources.