![]() ![]() That’s the dilemma here: freedom versus happiness. It’s meant to make a difference in the actual world, instead, where we can still hang on to our freedoms as opposed to eliminating pain and suffering. Nobody’s saving the day in this novel, where we are left instead with a sense of foreboding and our own thoughts about the future. The two worlds collide and tragedy ensues. (The story shifts between three of them.) When Bernard takes Lenina along for a trip to a savage reservation, they uncover a blast from their boss’s past. And most of the population is okay with being along for the ride.īut not quite one of the main characters. Certain vices are required (like promiscuous sex which begins in childhood). Relationships are banished (included the familial ones). To achieve happiness, everyone’s every move is prescribed, partly by fetal modification and then psychological manipulation in childhood (and even a sophisticated type of osmosis). The goal of the society, which during the book has been going on for a long time, is a happy populace. Here’s the gist: There has been an event in human history, after which everything changed and the dating system started afresh. ![]() It gets awkward.) The book also has less historical or political roots, so it remains more immediate than some other dystopian literature because of that, too. ![]() (Think of things like Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999.” These dates pass. ![]() And the first intelligent thing that is done in that book is to set it in a time after the present age, so that it could remain possible in time for a long, long while yet. This time around, I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World first. In actuality, they are very different books, but we’ll get into that in a second. I was in high school when I was assigned 1984 and a college freshman when I read Brave New World for a perspectives class. (Not anymore.) They are also both classics of dystopian fiction and are both books you might be required to read in high school or college. I’m going to review these books together, because they had been all mixed up in my memory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |