Referat Brave new world - The Author, Brave New World

Brave new world

The Author: Aldous Huxley was born in 1894 in Great Britain. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and before writing on his own, he worked as a journalist and dramatic critic.He was disillusioned with human behaviour and described every aspect of love with an undertone of disgust.

Since 1937 he lived in California where he died in 1963.

Brave New World: The story takes place in a futuristic England, where people are produced artifical and divided into five different castes. The three lower castes undergo 'Bokanovsky's Process' which means that one egg is divided until 96 identical twins are produced. These people are trained to work and like their lives by different conditioning. The main method is sleep - teaching, or hypnopaedia which is very important for moral education.

Sexual freedom- 'Everyone belongs to everyone else'.

Bernard Marx and his friend Helmholtz Watson, two Alphas, are different from the others because they are individuals. Bernard invites a pretty Gamma employee, Lenina Crowne, to come with him to a Savage Reservation. It's very hard to get the permit, but when Bernard talks to his director about it, he tells him, that he has been there with a girl too, long time ago. The girl got lost and was never seen again.

Lenina is disgusted by the dirt and the smells in the Reservation. They have never seen old or ill people before, because in the new civilization people are deserved from growing old as well as from all kinds of deseases.

Finally they see the most ugly person. Leaded by a young, white man, Bernard and Lenina come to Linda, who is fat, dirty and smelling of alcohol. They learn that she once is the girl who was lost long ago. In the Reservation, she did the most terrible thing for a civilized woman: She gave birth to a son, John, whom's father is the director of Hatcheries. He is keen to see the 'Brave New World', as he has read in a poem of Wiliam Shakespeare, and comes to London with Bernard.

John is in love with Lenina and dreams in a romantic way of her. But when he tells her of his feelings, she immediately begins to undress - it's her way to show 'love', which she is - of course- not able to feel.

John is disgusted and he begins to hate this world when Linda dies in a hospital by the age of 40. He makes a speech to a group of lower caste people, telling them that they are slaves and should throw away their soma, which is the common drug. On of the hypnopaedia speeches is: 'A gramme is better than a damne'. All people take it if they feel just a bit distressed.

John is arrested and brought before his Fordship Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers. He explains him the principles of the new civilization. Truth and beauty are dangerous, comfort and happiness are most important.

The young Savage runs away to live in a deserted lighthouse to live on his own, but soon many reporters and tourists come to see him.

One day  Lenina is among them. John beats her and himself and everything ends in an orgy.

The following day the next tourists find John, who has hanged himself.

Personal opinion: I liked the thought of a world without love and individualism where still someone manages to be different. But it was depressing that there is no happy end. Does that mean that there is also no hope for our world, with our society going nearly the same way as Huxley's does? I still won't give up hope that our world doesn't end that way.

The book was really exciting and offered me many things to think about.