A
Summary of "BRAVE NEW WORLD"
In BNW we are confronted with a fictitious society in future London in
the year 632 after Ford. "Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of the
World State. Community means standardised citizens, all divided up into social
grades a,b,g,d,e. Everybody accepts his
assigned grade and respects the other one. Stability is reached by this
conditioning of the "test-tube-babies" to perfect, contented workers and with
the drug named "Soma". Individuality is seen as unnecessary and
hostile towards Stability and so in this further development of man-kind
replaced by Community. This total sameness is reached by the "Pokanovsky-Process",
in which one egg is cloned to ninety others, hatched in a bottle and finally
conditioned. The parents are given by the state to avoid feelings of love and
individual treatment.
One
of the main characters is the very attractive laboratory assistant in the
London Hatching and Conditioning Center, named Lenina. She is -
according to the standard of this future society - a pleasure-seeking person
without careful choice. One of her man-friends; Bernhard Marx,
and she get permission of the Director of the Hatching and Conditioning Center (DHC)
and the World Controller (Musstafa Mond) to visit a Savage
Reservation, a remains of the old society, which reminds the reader of a slum.
Lenina even is disgusted by the unfamiliar scenery, the way how people live
there, by dirt, dust, old age, and several diseases, which is all more or less
unknown in BNW.
In
contrast to Lenina BM is an outsider, because of his small figure, his
individual thinking and his interest in the Savages' behaviour, rituals and
ways of living. There they meat Linda, who was left in the
Reservation, when she and her former man-friend, the DHC, visited it. After
giving birth to their child, named John, it would have been a
scandal to go back to the BNW and so Linda and her son had to stay there. First
she had various problems to adapt herself to the "new" society, having only one
man at the same time and to alcohol instead of taking "Soma". John is also seen
as an outsider, because of his light skin colour, as it is BM, because of the
fact that the conditioning didn't work. They become friends and BM decides to
take Linda and John with him to BNW. As they arrive in BNW BM confronts the DHC
with the fact of having a natural born son and as a consequence the Director of
the Hatch and Conditioning Center is given the sack. But John is seen as a
museum object and he soon recognises that BNW isn't as good as his mother
always told him. He tries to make the BNW'ers realise how diseased their form
of society is. Then he and BM are reprimanded by MM. BM is send to an island
with Helmholtz-Watson, a friend with a similar way of individual
thinking. John is kept there for some experiments. After a while dissociates
himself from the BNW and lives quite alone in a lighthouse, mourning for his
mother Linda, who died of an overdose of soma. Moreover he tries to forget
Lenina, who isn't able to have emotional feelings such as love and only wants
to have sex with him. When he is annoyed with photos and questions by some
reporters he hangs himself in the lighthouse.
