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Identity In Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'

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In the novel “Brave New World,” the author, Aldous Huxley, carefully scopes the life of John “the Savage” as a specifically distinct character from the rest of the other characters, whether civilized or not. Born and raised in an environment of some individual thinking, self- thought, and human expression John’s ability to accept or reject ideas, fits in with today’s society of what we coin as the word identity.
John represents the most important and complex character of Brave New World. John is willing to face the truth about his own problems in different situations. Unlike Bernard, whose discontentment with his society conveys itself as cowardly and egotistical, John lives out his ideals, however unwisely. For example, he dauntlessly attempts …show more content…

When John and Helmholtz meet, John reads a part in the scene where Juliet’s parents were trying to persuade her to marry Paris. Hearing this absurdity of marriage, Watson couldn’t help but to burst into laughter. His reaction greatly surprises John and takes it as a sign of an insult. These kinds of human relations the World State bans such as tragic, sadness, passion is why Watson reacted that way, and this greatly wounds John. Before Watson and John’s meeting, he never felt any negativity towards Watson, he was even finally relieved to be able to find someone to share the artistic value of Shakespeare’s language, but disdains Helmholtz’s laughter to both his cultural values and innermost feelings. This demonstration of the power of conditioning makes John hate the World State. John finds out the truth about the World State and perceives the World State society as materialistic, superficial, and immoral.
John’s feeling of apprehension ever since arriving at the World State from the Savage Reservations, makes him realize that he never could fit in with this society. Although happiness is the dominating force within the World State, John never finds himself truly happy.

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Many people throughout their lives at least once acted recklessly and irrationally to overcome challenges. Without thinking thoughtfully, the actions they performed may have harmed others or themselves. This is why the phrase, “think before you act” is created, to prevent others from performing tactless maneuvers to satisfy their challenges and emotions. In the novel, A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley suggests that individuals who act recklessly in the face of adversity will fail miserably; these reckless actions will cause despair and grief for the individual or others because of their lack of thinking and overwhelming of emotions. In A Brave New World, author Aldous Huxley introduced an Alpha-Plus male named Bernard Marx.

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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World depicts an unknown world based on the events of Henry Ford. Huxley formed a society in which regular people were separated according to the genetic modifications they were given at hatch. Although this society was intended to be “perfect,” many issues persisted, such as alcoholism, women’s roles in society, and a type of mind control referred to as “conditioning.” Because of the mass of people affected and the efforts to amend them, those issues remain plausible alongside other issues worldwide. Alcoholism (also known as soma distribution) was a problem of Huxley’s society that is relative, but less severe nowadays.

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In his book the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie portrays a teenage boy, Arnold Spirit (junior) living in white man’s world, and he must struggle to overcome racism and stereotypes if he must achieve his dreams. In the book, Junior faces a myriad of misfortunes at his former school in ‘the rez’ (reservation), which occurs as he struggles to escape from racial and stereotypical expectations about Indians. For Junior he must weigh between accepting what is expected of him as an Indian or fight against those forces and proof his peers and teachers wrong. Therefore, from the time Junior is in school at reservation up to the time he decides to attend a neighboring school in Rearden, we see a teenager who is facing tough consequences for attempting to go against the racial stereotypes.

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Brave New World Character Analysis Lily Christensen John the Savage In the novel Brave New World, John is the World State’s greatest nightmare, and causes the utmost problems for what they believe to be their perfect society. He has flaws, family, identity, feelings, morals, and a uniqueness to him that nobody else in the World State possesses. He is an important aspect to this novel in a sense that he helps the reader understand what living in the World State is like, and how he can relate to the world today. Because John wasn’t born in the World State, he brings ideas and aspects of himself and his background to the civilians living in the there.

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When Huxley wrote the novel Brave New World he envisioned a world 600 years in the future. Although many of the things that Huxley writes about is very farfetched, other things are relatable, in fact some of them have already occurred. For example Huxley states that in the future we will have the ability to create children in test tube, modern day science has enabled us to come very close to that very same prediction. “The complete mechanisms were inspected by eighteen identical curly auburn girls in Gamma green, packed in crates by thirty four short legged, left-handed male Delta Minuses, and loaded into the waiting trucks and lorries by sixty three blue-eyed, flaxen and freckled Epsilon Semi Morons” (p.160). This is an example from the book about how they create the children.

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Modern Society and Brave New World Community, Identity, Stability. These are the ideas that are thrown at you from the very beginning of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, it is quite ironic that this is the motto chosen to represent the world state. Community is understood to be a group of diverse individuals coming together as one, yet in brave new world they predestine their citizens and sort them into different castes. Identity is understood to show individualism, yet the caste system limits anyone’s capability to be an individual.

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It’s crazy how many books and story lines can be so similar yet be written by different people and in different time periods. Brave New World was written in 1932 and in 1949 George Orwell published 1984, but both share some of the same elements. The movie The Hunger Games came out more recently, in 2012, and it is also somewhat similar to these novels. They all share the same dystopian elements, which include, futuristic, illusion of a perfect society, protagonist who rebels, and a totalitarian control. In Brave New World everyone must live according to the values of The World State, they are controlled through pleasure.

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Aldous Huxley develops the character of John in Brave New World through exile from the World State in order to elucidate the theme of not being able to escape the corruption that is society. After all the hardships John has been through, such as growing up on the Reservation with his mother, whose death also drove him to desperate actions such as starting a riot among some Deltas at the hospital, John was not able to properly cope with his “new life” in the World State. HIs positive view of what the “Other World” would be like was crushed when he realized how horrible and corrupt the people were there, all conditioned in uniformity to create stability. His disgust was only furthered by his exposure to the World State’s use of soma and sexual pleasure to keep people happily occupied. Everything that the people were conditioned and taught to do went against John’s beliefs, so he was understandably upset about it.

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Though Brave New World and Player Piano were originally written in 1931 and 1952 respectively, they, along with dystopia as a genre, remain immensely well-read to this day as thought experiments of societies gone awry. These fictitious accounts continue to be relevant because of their foresightful warnings about the future of reality, each one distinct and thought-provoking. While the two authors formulate their warnings using similar plot structures and techniques, Aldous Huxley writes of societal conformity in Brave New World, and Kurt Vonnegut writes of the consequences of automation in Player Piano. Both warnings emphasize the loss of meaning and purpose in life when faced with the threats of society’s progress. Both Huxley and Vonnegut

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Marxism is the idea of social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. Social processes are the way individuals and groups interact, adjust and reject and start relationships based on behavior which is modified through social interactions. Overall marxism analyzes how societies progress and how and society ceases to progress, or regress because of their local or regional economy , or global economy. In this case, Marxism’s theory applies to the novel, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, where a society where mass satisfaction is the instrument utilized by places of power known as the Alphas in order to control the oppressed by keeping the Epsilons numb, at the cost of their opportunity to choose their own way of life. Marx thinks that an individual had a specific job to do in order to contribute to their community and that is the only way to do so; There is no escaping your contribution either.

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