Writing Prompt 1991: Write an essay explaining how the places differ, what each place represents, and how their contrast contributes to the meaning of the work.
In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents to the reader a seemingly utopian society that has everything most people would want, no worries about overpopulation, food shortage, any relationship they want without any social repercussions, and a stable government and economic system. Everyone in this society is generally happy and relatively carefree. Things that could make people think are outlawed such as provocative literature like Shakespeare. Although this is so, not many feel the need to try to be reading such things because they were conditioned to not want to and are engineered to not want to by making people less or more intelligent by a class system. The world society in the novel symbolizes people in their most simple form and almost all of the characters form this society is incapable of any complexity the protagonist is able show and articulate. The society also shows how mechanization and mass production can stabilize people but also dehumanizes the people in the process. Mass production and Freudian logic become so ingrained in this society that it becomes essentially a religion to the point that the calendar is based off Henry Ford’s birth and Ford and Freud are synonymous.
The protagonist in the story is the antithesis of this society. John was born regularly without the use of any factory or mechanization, making him the only one of his kind in a world filled with what can be essentially called clones. He was raised by “savages” and therefore was never conditioned to like, hate, fear, love, or want any particular thing like the rest of society. He, unlike almost everyone else in the world, is well versed in Shakespeare and therefore is the only Shakespearian character in the whole story. Because of this, he not only has a different set of moral codes and beliefs (based on Shakespeare’s works), he is also able to articulate his more complex emotions in a way that no other character is able to since they were never exposed to a form of expression like complex literature. He embodies everything that the world society is not and therefore is unable to truly accept the simplistic happiness that the world offers and can never integrate to society. His eventual suicide at the end of the novel shows how incompatible he is to society.
The suicide that the protagonist John does at the end shows how in a society that is stifling and constrictive in its views and reasoning that a mind of massive complexity cannot thrive and ultimately expires as a result.
