Brave New, Ironic World

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

While describing a changing world and satirizing human kind in his dystopian novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley uses irony. Creating ironic situations and references, his novel can be viewed as comical because of the funny and odd situations his characters experience. They speak with irony, act with irony, and think with irony.

Helmholtz is an unusual character in Huxley’s novel who is much like Bernard, pertaining to his views on the society of the new world, but has his own trademark personality. An Alpha Plus individual, Helmholtz has been blessed with intelligence and opportunity, but ironically, is unsatisfied with his life and wishes for change. Bernard, Helmholtz’s familiar friend, wished for change because his appearance isolated him from his peers, but “that which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability.” Through his character, Huxley shows how happiness cannot be manufactured, created, or programmed into a person, even when that individual seems to have everything he could want. He demonstrates that a perfect world cannot truly be created and that not everyone can be content at once.

Throughout Brave New World, Huxley pokes fun at how desensitized his fictional population has become and how unhuman they appear. He satirizes the fact that with improved science and technology, their humanity has been lost, their individuality destroyed, and everything around them has become manufactured and standardized. The people of his society have become so automated that they are not always referred to as humans. “Infants were unloaded” from their cribs and imperfect people were dismissed as mistakes. Huxley uses this irony to demonstrate the madness involved with the loss of humanity and how inhumane people can become when technology becomes dominant.

Because the society has lost its humanity, morals and values are different from what we are familiar with. In Huxley’s created world, children are expected to participate in erotic play and show no abstinence. Hearing a nurse announce that a “little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play” is ironic to the reader because our society does not hold the same expectations. Huxley uses this shocking and disturbing scene to stir up a sense in the reader’s gut that something about his fictional world is not right and that mankind should resist becoming like this. He relates sex with children, putting two ideas that the reader would generally not associate together, in order to bring up an awareness of the loss of morals, the loss of ethics, and the main theme of the story: the loss of humanity.

While the awareness of global warming, endangered species, and deforestation is constantly crying out to be heard in our world, Huxley’s society is different when concerning nature. In a society in which production and stability are the only world issues, distractions must be limited and work must be increased. With this mindset, the population of the new world felt it was necessary to make changes in the way people thought and felt about the expansion of the natural world around them. “It was decided to abolish the love of nature.” This ironic statement is meant to strike the reader and point out the backwards views of the fictional society. These views are unreasonable, inhumane, and insensitive. From this statement, the reader should realize the loss of human spirit from the overwhelming thoughts of industrialization.

Irony can be found all throughout Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, as he successfully portrays the negative effects of the loss of humanity. Through comical situations, humor shows the reader how unreasonable people can become and by shocking his audience with disturbing thoughts, Huxley can show his worry for the future. Through irony, the themes of the novel are expressed.

/0 Comments/by

Military Difficulties

Although I do not notice or think of it often, there is something in my life, a seemingly invisible force, which is constantly affecting and changing my life, sometimes without my knowledge or without my acceptance. This force has been at work my entire life, even before I was born, and has resulted in my existence here on Earth. An active-duty member of the United States Air Force, my mother makes my life what it is, naming the government and the Armed Forces as fathers of mine. I follow orders from the Air Force just as she does.

My parents met each other while attending the Air Force’s Basic Training program, and I was a result. Throughout my entire life, the Air Force has told me where to live and I have grown comfortable temporarily living on government land in a government-owned house. I have known nothing but the white walls that have surrounded me in every house I’ve lived in, and cannot even imagine a painted wall, now. House expansions and remodeling seem against the law to me since they have been against my laws. I have grown used to following government regulations and no longer find moving often unusual. Throughout my seventeen years of life, I have called eight different houses home and have cheered for six different school mascots. Because I move often, problems arise. My grades do not correctly transfer affecting my class rank, classes I have taken are not accepted in different states, friends are left behind, items are lost, and I can never truly plan for the future because I never know what’s going to happen next. I learn to live on my toes and expect the unexpected. Because of the Air Force, I have seen a variety of places, and faced different climates growing comfortable right up against the Canadian border and the Mexican.

Because the Air Force controls when people come and go, I am comfortable giving goodbyes to loved ones, wondering when I’ll ever see someone again, and shedding tears at an airport. Each year I must meet new friends to leave the next year and while my sense of adventure brings optimism to each move, my sensitive side dwells on the loss of friends. Relationships of mine have broken and ended because of my situation, friends unable and unwilling to keep in contact. Family life is also affected, my mother willing to be sent away to participate in a war, help in a distant region, or receive more training in a different place. Gone for two weeks, gone for four weeks, gone for eight weeks, gone for twenty-four weeks, it’s different every time. With my mother’s long working hours, leaving the house at five in the morning to return as late as eight in the evening, and deploying to Maine, Alabama, Cuba, Afghanistan, I have adjusted to life at home with my dad. My mom’s schedule is unpredictable and she can leave at any point, sometimes even excusing herself from dinner or sneaking out from the darkness of the movie theatre. While I must be ready to leave a friend, my mom must be ready to serve her duties.

They tell her not to drink the water. They restrict her from the leaving the base alone. They issue her a gun and train her how to use it. The Air Force consists of people willing to work in dangerous situations to protect their homeland. My mother is one of these people and while she may not rush into combat with bullets brushing her shoulders and grenades ringing in her ears, she does reside in dangerous areas. Working in the medical field, my mother treats those who have fought and those who have been injured. Her enemy is disease and her goal is not to protect the innocent villagers, but to save their lives. While she is away, I worry for her safety, knowing that there is a possibility that she may not return.

As I live my life, the United States Air Force makes many major decisions for me: where I will live, when I will say goodbye to my friends, when my mother will work and where she will deploy. While these may add difficulties to my life at times, I have grown used to them and have become familiar with the procedures. I continue to make new friends as I am pulled from one place and stuck in another and continue to worry for my mother as she is sent away from my family and me. I take required classes that I have missed and try to straighten my grades out between schools. I may live as if I could move soon, but I try to find “home” in each place I reside. Because of these difficulties, my perspective of life has been sculpted, leaving me to believe, “You never know what’ll happen.”

/0 Comments/by

John, the Hope Within the Brave New World

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

To create an interesting novel there must exist a well-thought plot, developed characters, and some form of conflict. This conflict usually includes good versus evil, each side usually represented. Even in dystopian novels that tell of negative utopian worlds, hope is embodied in at least one character struggling against the dominant society and representing the last flicker of humanity as he tries not to be overwhelmed by the darkness. In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, a young man named John represents hope. Raised with morals and views that we are familiar with, John struggles to survive in a different society, desperately fighting as he brings his own light to the dim novel.

Throughout Brave New World, Huxley describes a fictional future for our planet in which people are created and manufactured, then told how to live their lives. The ideas of family life, sexual abstinence, marriage, and solitude are abandoned and people are brainwashed with hypnopaedia to believe, think, desire, and decide how the Society wants them to. With morals and ethics that contradict our own, the people of this society seem doomed to live a life with little personal freedoms and glazed eyes. The future looks dim and change seems like an impossibility.

While creating a dystopian novel, Huxley does not devastate the reader with a deprivation of hope. By adding the character of John who was raised outside of the Society with similar morals as the reader would most likely have, hope is restored and “good” is introduced to the story, just as it must be in any novel. As the story progresses, the emphasis focuses more clearly on John and his trouble adjusting to the Society. This theme of isolation, discrimination, and differences is common throughout the entire novel and is portrayed through John’s small gleam of hope. His positive aura keeps the reader interested, the story continuing, and the conflicts brewing. While his view may be considered “correct” to the reader, they are considered immoral to the residents of the new world, causing him to be shunned, disliked, studied, and questioned. As he lives in the Society, John continues to spread his positive views, delivering the motifs of the novel and keeping the hope alive.

Because a novel cannot exist without conflict and problems, characters with different views are placed together, stressful situations are created, and emotions are stirred. To help deliver his message, Huxley creates a positive character named John, following the formula and bringing an opposing force to the dominant society. This individual faces discrimination because of his differences and is left to suffer in solitude. He demonstrates perseverance and determination and continues to fight against the controlling society. With the inclusion of this positive character, Huxley creates a conflict that delivers his themes and demonstrates his messages. John is the guiding light that reveals the darkness of the new world.

 

/0 Comments/by