A Brave New World Quote Analysis

What is happiness to you, what would you risk for it, and what would you sacrifice for it? In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Bernard Marx faces difficult choices in his pursuit of happiness while staying true to his ideals, and to himself and who he is by not taking soma, because it's okay to be different. Through the use of dialogue, the protagonist Bernard, and a number of symbols, Aldous Huxley conveys the idea that the cost of happiness can be to blind you from the truth or strip you of your identity.

Aldous Huxley uses dialogue and interactions between characters to convey the idea of happiness costing you the truth and your identity. The intellectual and moral Dystopia of ‘Brave New World’ seems like a Utopia, but there are deeper

Two such symbols are change and the government and its control over society in this quote: “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability” (Huxley 153). Although change can lead to bad things, it can also lead to better lives and lead to a positive outcome. Because they live in a totalitarian state, the government sees any change as a threat, because everything is going perfectly, but what Bernard needs is change, as he has been different his entire life. Almeda King, a literary critic also states that “ (p. 155). In the beginning, man's need for security and stability led him to relinquish his freedom to the World State, which in turn was to provide him with what he seemed so desperately to need at the time: Community, Identity, Stability-the World State's motto (p. 1). Ironically, man's need for stability was augmented by the atmosphere and the products of an industrial civilization founded on and existing on mass product” (Almeda King 821). People crave stability, they crave safety, and reliability, so much so that they would be willing to sacrifice their freedom, and while this was intended to be temporary, the government made that change permanent, trapping them in their unending

So is Brave New Worlds’ version of happiness, really, true happiness? Everyone is so busy working that they can't admire the fine things in life, as the Director puts it: “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” (Huxley 14). Nature represents freedom, and true, pure happiness, but in this society, people are taught to dislike nature and to stay in cities, where they work instead of enjoying the outside. They are keeping people satisfied with what everyone believes to be the best life they could be living, while they are truly imprisoned. Mustapha speaks about these restrictions in a positive light when he says: “You can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get… they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age;... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave...And if anything should go wrong, there's soma.” (Huxley 220). People are heavily restricted in what they can do, what they can feel, and what they know, but to Mustapha, this is an ideal world, because it keeps everyone orderly, without realizing that they are prisoners to their society, kept in line with bland enjoyment, and void of almost all other emotions, and without any knowledge of what life could be. Almeda King