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Stephanie Brown
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"'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'"
This is one of those classics that I never read in high school or college. The first few pages bored me but as the setting unfolds, the characters unfold, and as the characters breathe life into the pages, the utopia is quickly revealed as a dystopia. I've read criticism that the characterization is weak, that the characters are cartoonish, but Huxley knows what he's doing. The characters are a product (literally since they're cloned), a slave to their environment.
I loved the literary allusions (Shakespeare), the irony, the paradoxes, and the archetypes (hero, mother, etc.). Huxley plays with these devices through the characters and their settings. Some critics have bemoaned the heavy-handedness that Huxley uses with such literary devices, but I think the exaggerations with allusion are noble. Huxley was clearly having fun while writing this novel; HE TOOK RISKS and I think this is the reason why Brave New World is still read and respected today. In fact, it's one of the reasons why this is now one of my favorite books.
Huxley's creative use of punctuation is also effective (as with the comma splices in the quote above). This is one of my favorite passages because the punctuation evokes this sensual rush, and the final simple sentence is plaintive yet evocative.
The final paragraph took my breath away. As a reader, I came to understand just how brilliant Huxley had to be to share such a vision. Sure, he isn't entirely accurate in his predictions about the future, but the relationship of happiness and truth is certainly spot-on. Can we have both? Some readers will also love grappling with age-old questions of pre-destination, fate, and freedom.
Mustpha Mond, a controller for this new world order, makes an interesting comment near the end of the novel about how those living in the "civilized" world are still living through those glass vials from which they were "decanted".
The imagery and symbolism in those final lines make my heart fluctuate in odd rhythms because Huxley leaves the reader trapped in an excruciating ecstasy.
For a novel that started very cold and inorganic with descriptions of a building, the novel's ending is a powerful contrast of flesh...and blood. ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
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bookshelves: to-read
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bookshelves: to-read
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bookshelves: to-read
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bookshelves: to-read
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"The characters are a little flat to me but I'm accepting it as a comment on the environment/setting more than characterization itself."
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