In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the world is perfect. There are few diseases, no one is lonely, and there’s time to do everything one could want to. Everyone is with everyone all the time. The caste system keeps everyone happy. However, there is one bottle-bred-baby, who is alone and an outcast. Bernard Marx. Bernard is an exile from the beginning of the book. He is rumored to have had, “alcohol in his blood-surrogate,” (p. 46) which causes him to be small, ugly, and “stunted.” He is one of the highest members in this “civilized” caste system, an Alpha Plus. This means he’s one of the smartest and most evolved members of society. He is an outcast partially by choice, but partially because he’s so strange. He doesn’t enjoy most of the activities …show more content…
He becomes very proud, and fails to realize how temporary this fame is. People didn’t especially like Bernard as a person, they just liked what he did. “But behind his back people shook their heads. ‘That young man will come to a bad end,’” they would say. (Pg. 157) Unfortunately, they were right. After a point, the Savage refuses to be shown off anymore, and Bernard loses all of the respect he temporarily held. He gets in trouble for not keeping an eye of the Savage, and he ends up being exiled literally to an island. Huxley tried to craft a world free of pain, opposition, and problems. His world was filled with happiness and people. This world failed to provide the opposition humans need to appreciate their lives. If one does not feel lonely, one can’t appreciate company. If one does not experience pain, one can’t love bliss. Huxley was warning against a world without opposition, which the world of the twenty-first century is quickly approaching. In order to truly be a human being, and to truly live, one must live through both the good and the
His understanding bothers him; however, he believes it sets him on a pedestal. Bernard looks down upon others while he still conforms to society making him an outsider to his world.
For example, at one point he gave in and took soma and ended up being involved in an orgy-porgy. This goes against what Bernard normally believes in, he doesn’t want meaningless sex with someone he doesn’t care about, he believes it should take part with two people that care for one another. Yet, the fame of brining in
Like Huxley, Bernard is an outsider, and inherently outsiders have a different point of view than those in the mainstream. Having a character like Bernard adds a dimension to this book that enables Huxley to talk
Because of this way that other people look at Bernard he is not happy, in their society everybody is meant to be happy but in some rare cases that is not true. This incident is similar in many books, for example, The Catcher in the Rye, where Holden feels that he is different and left out of society. Bernard feels the same way for the majority of the book and it can be said he resembles a rhinoceros. 2. “I thought that in the Other Place … I mean, Linda always said that nobody was ever alone
The Savage (John)- He was born on a reservation where he was taught the values of his people. Love, hard work, sacrifice, religion, and an understanding of the people around him were a part of a larger group of connected people, rather than just people he lived with. When he was brought to the Brave New World he was an outcast because of his different beliefs that he shared with none of his new members of society. 4. Mustapha Mond-
This leaves John feeling unhappy and causes Bernard to make the remark “You’re more like what you were at Malpais,”. Bernards failure to realize how to help John adjust and the parts of him that are unable to change gives the reader better insight as to why John is failing to enjoy his time in
Nor does it make him happy with his station in life. The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex. This is because he sees all these things as short term happiness and he beings to question why do we have to do this and why is all this short-term why can’t we get long term happiness. As the book goes on Bernard being to realize that is suffering that is missing in this society and he sees all these things are filling in for happiness, he immediately wants to change that.
Huxley's ideas that our society is numbed by things that we love and that everyone is almost happy to be somewhat oppressed is almost too real. It is pretty easy to see and make connections after evaluating our society that we live in. I agree with Neil Postmans assertions claiming that Brave New World is most relevant to our society. One of Postman’s claims that i related to is “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” this is expressed in the book by the simple quote “community, identity, stability”(1).
"Everyone belongs to everyone else," whispered the voice in the dreams in Huxley's future world. The learning of lessons heard during sleep suggestion disheartened separation in friendship and love. In a sense, everyone in the novel is essentially everyone else as well. All the fetal conditioning, the learning of lessons through sleep training, and the power of convention makes each individual into an interchangeable part of the society, valuable only for the purpose of making the whole run as smooth as possible. Uniqueness is uselessness and uniformity is bliss in this novel because social stability is everything that matters.
Once Bernard finds John, he starts taking advantage of John’s uniqueness as an opportunity to fight his internal class struggle. Rather than yearning for change in society as in the beginning of the novel, Bernard is more concerned with impressing others and climbing up the ladder. While there are no monetary stresses in Brave New World, Bernard feels the need to improve his status because of his mistreatment by the lower classes as a result of his physical disabilities. For example, when Bernard is trying to get the lower castes to prepare his helicopter, he has to exert force, even as an Alpha male, to accomplish tasks (Huxley 64). Bernard starts treating John like an object, rather than a person.
Truth and happiness are two things people desire, and in the novel, an impressive view of this dystopia’s two issues is described. In this society, people are created through cloning. The “World State” controls every aspect of the citizens lives to eliminate unhappiness. Happiness and truth are contradictory and incompatible, and this is another theme that is discussed in “Brave New World” (Huxley 131). In the world regulated by the government, its citizens have lost their freedom; instead, they are presented with pleasure and happiness in exchange.
In the Brave New World, a book written by Aldous Huxley,, he writes about a utopian future where humans are genetically created and pharmaceutically anthesized. Huxley introduces three ideals which become the world's state motto. The motto that is driven into their dystopian society is “Community, Identity and Stability.” These are qualities that are set to structure the Brave New World. Yet, happen to contradict themselves throughout the story.
Bernards alienation because of his physique and his enrichment from his different moral views illuminates the meaning of the novel overall which is the definition of freedom. The utopia in the novel puts a lot of emphasis on conformity and discourages individuality, which is something Bernard doesn’t follow the rules of. As seen in a conversation in chapter 6 with Bernard and Lenina, Lenina insists that the society has a great deal of freedom represented by soma and its hypnotic state. The author uses this technique to show the reader that the true definition of freedom is not conformity and obedience, instead, it’s the independence to be an individual apart from the rest of
With community and identity, stability is supposed to be achieved, but the novel makes you question if stability is an actual thing that can happen in society. In Brave New World, many things are done to ensure stability, three of them being the tyranny of happiness, drugging the population, and the mass production of children. With these three factors, it is eerie how close Aldous Huxley came to predicting the impact of these in the future of society. First of all, the world state is obsessed with making people “happy”. They want everyone in society to be happy to ensure social stability.
Bernard is the only one who tries to break the lack of individualism in his community. Bernard wanted to be “more on [his] own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body”(Huxley 90). The utopians described themselves as being to everyone else that no one was on their own. However, Bernard wanted to be different than everyone else, he felt different than everyone else.