Reading log 3: Brave New World

The novel goes through a sudden change when the savage John’s mother dies. This is a tragic and miserable moment for John, which entirely changes his attitude to life and to the civilization he has arrived in. Furthermore, John decides to act on an impulse to show the inhabitants of the civilization how corrupt and brainwashing the society is according to him.

   However, even after he has held a speech for a group of workers about how bad the drug soma is and that their imagined freedom really is imprisonment, they still do not believe him and rather chooses the drug that they are used to than John’s so called freedom. The incident summoned the police whom took John away, among with his friends, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson. They came in order to save John before he did something too stupid, but apparently they came to late and the police were already on the way.

    The reason I believe this is the turning point of the novel, is because before John’s mother’s death John kept quite about his opinions about the civilization, but afterwards he feels like he cannot do that anymore and therefore tries to create a riot and make the other people see the same things he has discovered. At this turning point, I consider that the novel goes from innocence and cowardice, where you live with the society’s rules even though you perhaps do not agree with them, to that some stands up to say their opinions and tries to change the world into the better, according to them.

    The police take the three friends to the World Controller, which executes the sentence that Bernard and Helmholtz will be sent to an island in exile. However, John will stay with them in to order to go through experiments but he does not approve of it. John wants to receive his freedom. “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” is a quotation from the novel, which clearly confirms John’s disagreement with the civilization where it is not allowed to be unhappy, or have any negative feelings at all. Moreover, I believe this is the message of the novel. Everyone has the right to be happy and satisfied but nonetheless everyone should also have the right to be unhappy and sorrowful. The message is therefore that even with a perfect society where everything runs smoothly and everyone is happy, the people really do not even know what happiness is. Without sadness you cannot know how it feels to be joyful and therefore the way to achieve happiness is not through abandoning all negative feelings. Instead by embracing all emotions you can find your path in the maze and hopefully, in the end, achieve true happiness and not some synthetic kind the people in the novel Brave New World lives on. Freedom to choose what to do and what to feel is an essential ingredient to pursue and find happiness, an ingredient that is non-existent in the civilization Huxley created, and therefore true happiness is unreachable.

    The novel ends with another death, this time it is John’s own. He escaped the World Controller and tried to live on his own, where he wants to have the freedom to be unhappy and sad, where he wants the easement to hurt himself for the greater good and the right to stay unconnected to the civilization he encountered before. Except, it does not go as planned because people find him and go on pilgrimage there to receive the chance to see the savage in real life and in action. When John understands that he have turned into another amusement for the population of the civilization, the pure thing that he despises and a position he tried to escape, he decides to take his own live in order to end the civilizations grip over him, because as dead they cannot use him for entertainment, experimentation or amusement.

    I believe even though the book became more and more confusing by every page of the latter part of the novel, the ending was still a good conclusion of the book. It showed what the civilization was all about, to use everything they could for their advantage, and the only way to escape them forever is by death. As long as you are alive they will follow you in order to use you for their intentions and make your life seem dependent on their rules, but when death comes you are granted your freedom.

    Lastly, to discuss the title again I still agree with what I wrote in my first reading log, that the author’s intention with writing the book was to write something radical and different in comparison with other views at that time, and therefore he chose the title Brave New World.  On the other hand, now afterwards when I have read the whole book I have found another reason for him to choose this title. The character the savage John is a huge enthusiast of Shakespeare. “Oh, brave new world!” is both a quote from the works of Shakespeare and also from the novel Brave New World. This is something John says numerous times in the novel and is in a way, how he describes the society, which Aldous Huxley has created, and I believe it is also partly because of this the title Brave New World was chosen.  

Isabel Vinterbladh NA11A