Brave New World 4 Essay, Research Paper

Brave New World Final

1.) The Savage Reservation is similar to the Utopia world in several ways. They both have drugs that are designed to calm people down. Soma, used in the Utopia and mescal used in the Reservation. They both also have a separation within their own society. The Utopia has social castes and the reservation has separation between the men and women, the men having more power. The two worlds also both have ceremonies. The Utopia has the orgy porgy ceremony in which everyone gathers around and has an orgy, hence the name. The Savage Reservation has traditional dancing ceremonies like the many traditional Indian tribes have today. The two cultures have many similar ideas, just expressed a little differently.

These two societies also have many different customs, ways, and styles of living. The Brave New World is clean, sanitary, and organized. Where as in the reservation there s garbage every where, its dusty, and full of dogs and flies, the complete opposite. In the Utopia people aren t born anymore, they are grown. Another difference between the two worlds is in the Reservation people are still born the old fashion way. In the Brave New World everyone is young and pretty their whole lives thanks to chemicals and conditioning. It s the complete opposite in the savage reservation. As seen by the old man, it s shown that people in the Reservation age normally, loose their teeth, and get wrinkles. The reservation represents more of an old, more class time period whereas the Utopia is perhaps not to distant future gone wrong. In both societies, both of them still are imperfect but in completely different ways.

2.) When Linda was on the reservation she didn t seem to cope with it very well. She got fat, became an alcoholic, and was just a big mess. She hated how dirty the reservation was and how there was no easily accessible hot water so she could clean things. She hated the beastly clothes she had to wear instead of her old darling clothes. Linda also didn t like the fact that she has to mend her clothes instead of just throwing them away when they got worn and then simply just buying new clothes. She missed the soma because only mescal is available to her now, gives her a hangover which she disliked. She hated how she got pregnant with John because she was taken away from everything she loved. She was forced then to get used to this completely new life style. Though she liked the mother-son relationship with john. When she comes back to the Utopia she took advantage of the Soma and went on a non-stop soma trip.

3.) John is an outsider in the Reservation community. He was barred from marrying the Indian girl he loved and from being initiated into the tribe like very other boy. He was denied the tribe s community and identity, which made him different and an outsider. So instead he goes through the initiations rituals of fasting and dreaming on his own to prove to himself that he is a man. John also didn t like men sleeping with his mother because it made him more of an outcast. Linda was sleeping with everyone when she fist arrived she was punished and looked down upon by the tribe. So John is looked down upon as well because when they see John they think Linda. When they think of her they see shame and disgrace. John has no real place in the reservation; he s caught between the two worlds and neither want to accept him in as their own.

4.) John and Bernard share some qualities and traits. They both feel different from everyone else; they re outcasts in each of their own worlds. John is an outcast because of his mother due to her different nature. Bernard is an outcast because he likes to be alone, which no one understands and sort of understands beauty, which is another unknown concept to most of the Utopians. Both of them are shy when it comes to women and they want more that just to sleep with women they want a real relationship, which Lenina doesn t understand. The two, John and Bernard both are in love with Lenina and both feel that they aren t worthy of her. They also both don t know how to express their feelings and thoughts to Lenina very well. It takes Lenina a little while before she catches on. John and Bernard are just two lonely rejects looking for some compassion.

John is also quite different from Bernard. John is from an ugly, uncivilized world that is more true to nature than Bernard s is. Bernard is from a classy, civilized world but has screwed around with nature perhaps too much. Bernard is better educated than John is, but John has a better understanding of Shakespeare than Bernard ever could. This is because John gets the idea of family and love, having a Linda and Pope, as a father figure. All Bernard wants is to fit in to society and be like everyone, which happens for awhile when he brings John to the Utopia. John on the other hand wants to spread the truth to people and set things into what he sees as right into the society. So when he s talking to the controller, he tries convincing him to change the Utopia and to fix things to how they use to be. John is more wild and dangerous than Bernard, while Bernard is an easier going, romantic guy.

5.) John uses Shakespeare to express feelings he doesn t know quite how to say, but even sometimes Shakespeare doesn t even have the right words. He uses Shakespeare to learn new concepts about life and human nature that he knows nothing about and that s what interests him into reading it. He uses Shakespeare as a reference for everything he feels. Even though he doesn t get the whole picture that Shakespeare is saying, he understands that family is important in ones life and that s is one of his problems he has with the Utopia. He understands the concept of love to a point and that s why he quotes Shakespeare to Lenina a couple times, to show his emotions. He talks about suffering to the Controller trying to explain how easy and plain life is without suffering, how unreal it is and how you cant continue to learn without it. With suffering you can then understand true beauty. You can t learn from your mistakes and ever evolve from them without the two.

6.) The Controller says religion is more for older people because one might want to know why they exist and why they are here, but since no one gets old in the Utopia, it isn t an issue. He also talks about how people only tend to wonder about religion when they are alone for self-reflecting. Thought since no one is alone in the Brave New World anymore, or at least almost never this doesn t happen. He says that religion was good for people who needed hopes and dreams to set goals so that had something to motivate them and give them hope in hard times. But now no one needs any of this since death is not a fear thanks to death conditioning and Soma. People in the Utopia have everything they want they don t need any sort of motivation and they aren t looking for any answers, so why would they need any religion? Mond believes that religion is for the weak and feeble, for those who are looking for answers and need guidance.

7.) The Controller says that truth and beauty go hand in hand. To have beauty and art, you need truth. Without truth there is no understanding of art, hence no real art can be produced. Art is trying to show or represent human life and creative ideas of an individual. The art has a lesser of a meaning because so many concepts have been taken away from the people. But in the Utopia there is no history to depict in art. They have no history, no real pain, and no idea what good art would be because everything is good already so there s nothing bad to compare it to. How could anything stand out and be recognized if everything was so good. If every piece of art was as good as the Sistine Chapel, it wouldn t be special then anymore and it would have no value.

8.) The Controller believes that Soma is necessary to kept society together. He feels that it holds people together as a community and as a whole. He expresses that if somehow you ever feel unpleasant in any way, Soma is just what you need. It s just a perfect escape from reality just take a couple of pills when ever you feel like it and you won t suffer any side affects. The Controller felt that after a short Soma holiday, your anger is calmed and you are a better person to the rest of society now. In the past you could only do these things by making the effort for several years of hard moral training, and with strict religion. But now half your morality is now safely tucked into a Soma bottle.

9.) John thought that death conditioning was one of the most unmoral things about the Utopia. John felt that when a loved one is dying s/he should spend his or her remaining time with loved ones, but in this Brave New World no one is loved anymore. He hated the fact that there was no respect for the ones who were dying. No one goes to visit people while they are in their last hours or goes to show their respects at a funeral or cemetery after one is gone, s/he is just forgotten. John most likely feels like this because it reassures him to think that he will be remembered after he s gone in the reservation and not just forgotten in this world. Which is what religion help does for many today. It s just normal human nature, unlike the Utopians. People just want to feel like they have a purpose in life, its just human nature.

10.) John does what he does in the end out of confusion and anger. This Utopian society has anger him, confused him, and twisted his thoughts around so much that he doesn t know what to think. That s probably one of his reasons for going to the old lighthouse structure. He needed to get away from it all and to reflect on what s going on. Then when the media crowd gathers he get angry about what this world has done to people, what it has done to Lenina especially. All the anger plus the confusion of all the people around him he starts whipping who is thought to be Lenina and starts a huge brawl. Then after that he feels so ashamed about what he had done he couldn t live with himself anymore and committed suicide. He commits suicide for other reasons as well. He can t take the Utopian society anymore, its persistency in not changing, and as well as being depressed without Lenina and his mother.

Extra Credit:

a.) The concept of love only exists in the Utopia over possessions and their life, not over people. The Utopian s don t understand what love is due to all the conditioning they have gone through as a child and not having any parents in their life. Lenina is a perfect example of this. She is confused and scared of the love idea that John tries to express to her. All she understands from John is that he wants her, and so she confuses this with sex and gets herself in a big mess. There is one kind of love though that does exist in the Utopia and that is the love over possessions. Lenina for example loves her clothes and how she is a beta, but she has not emotional love over anyone. This goes for everyone in the Utopia. The only way this would change in the Utopia is if they had any sort of family, like Linda did. Linda was perhaps the only Utopian that ever experiences real emotional love, which was towards john. This shows that love starts from family, then later expressed into others like John to Lenina.

b.) History only exists to the very few elite in the Utopia. The only people who knew any history at all are Alphas, probably only Alpha pluses. All they would know though is that family s existed at one time, with the whole mother, father, and child relationship. The only people who would know any real history would be the 10 world controllers, like Mustapha Mond. The controllers know history probably for two reasons. One because its been passed down from controller to controller throughout the generations. Second any good leader should be well educated in the arts and history, as Mustapha Mond is. To everyone else in the general Utopian public history has no role because it is bunk . It seems though that because history is not taught the Utopian civilization doesn t improve. The problem with that is how do they know what they re doing is the best way to run things. And the Utopia already isn t perfect if there are people like Bernard and Linda. If you don t learn from your mistakes how do you get better.