Brave New World

[Shawna]

I just read chapter 3 yesterday and I thought it was a great chapter. Even though there were 3 or 4 different conversations going on and it kept switching between them, it wasn't difficult to follow. There were only a couple of instances where I got confused and didn't know who was talking. Good writing on Huxley's part.

[Sadie]

I'm just about half way right now, and all I'm saying is that this is definately not what I was expecting, although I'm not sure what I was expecting.

[Sadie]

I agree Shawna, I didn't get confused and it started playing out in my head like a movie flashing from one scene to the next, knowing that they were all taking place at the same time.

[Sadie]

I just finished it. I didn't anticipate how much sex these people have! Overall the story was ok, but its meaning was a little too obvious for me and I didn't like one of the last few chapters where Huxley basically lays it all out for the reader what this world is all about and what it stands against. I think it would have been better without the explanation..let us draw our own conclusions. I'm still not sure how this became required reading in high schools. I get the loss of freedom, loss of the individual and how alluring some things can be where we would give up our freedoms for it. I just don't get what the hype is all about.

[Sadie]

John's situation is sad. He had grown up imagining what this other world was, and how wonderful it is. His mother had painted such a beautiful picture of it all. He becomes disenchanted with it and comes to see what it really is. I couldn't get a real grasp on how long he was in society before he left again. The one thing I don't understand is his absolute turn on Lenina. I thought that after some time, and especially after speaking with the controller, that he would come to understand where she was coming from and at least why she was the way she was. I think she represented all that was alluring about this society for him and as he had a moral compass couldn't stand being drawn to her or her world.

[Sadie]

That's true, he has a sense of morality but no place to put it. In the end, John's choice is probably the only one he could make. How could he live there and not continued to be pestered by the society and going back to malpais would hold nothing for him. Where else is there to exist? He could have gone to the island, if the controller would have permitted it. There may have been happiness for him there, but who knows. The island is still made of people who are different from society, but not necessarily in every aspect. They may still have held some of the beliefs that have been ingrained in them from childhood, and therefore, he could have been an outsider with them as well.

[Shawna]

I just finished the book. I liked it, but there were some things that I wondered about. Why Henry Ford, and is it really Henry Ford the car guy? How did the world end up this way? My understanding of the Nine Years War is that it was like a world war which caused pretty much everything to crumble. But, I would think that after such an event, people would return to more primitive ways. And maybe this happened, but we just don't know.

[Sadie]

Those are some interesting facts about Ford and brings new light and meaning to the book. I understood the assembly line idea they grabbed from Ford and that, somehow, would deify him. Now knowing how he was as an employer, that makes even more sense why he was their god. One thing I found interesting was how people still used his name in vain. It was used often enough, there has to be something to it. No matter how deified he was, there was some level in which people disrespected him.

[Sara]

There is some great discussions going on about this book. What I found very interesting is trying to place this book in the time it was written in. I found many aspects of this future society not plausible, but when considering it was written in the 1930s, you can see that this future was perhaps plausible from that time.

One thing that really made me think about this was the helicopters. Today we think about flying cars in the future, but it turns out helicopters were just starting to really be used when this book was written. So they were kind of futuristic for the 1930s.

[Sara]

Now that I think about that, it's true. It makes you wonder what kind of social constructs and technology we think of today as futuristic, won't be considered futuristic in 70 years.

I mean where were the cell phones. That was another thing that I noticed in the book. At one point, I think it was Bernard, he said he needed to go make a call, as though he had to go find a phone. I just kept thinking, why don't you have a cell phone, isn't it the future?

[Shawna]

The feelies were kind of weird and I agree that they have something to do with virtual reality. It reminded me of a scene in the movie Demolition Man where Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock are wearing virtual reality helmets that allow them to have virtual sex. But Stallone's character was weirded out by it, kind of like John was by the feelies. I thought that it was interesting that the villain in the feelie was a black man. Seems like there's still some racism?

[Sadie]

I will say this, Huxley was amazing at his foresight as to how you could make a baby outside of the womb! I thought that pretty amazing for when he wrote it. How unbelievable it must have been for people to read that and yet we can do a lot of what he describes today. When you read this book and try to connect to the thoughts and feelings of the people in the 40's it takes on such a different meaning for me.