Literary Devices used in “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
In the book Brave New World the author, Aldous Huxley, uses rhetorical strategies and devices to show his readership the consequences that can come from continuing on the destructive path of self-involvement that can lead to the dystopia presented in the book. In the forward of the book, Huxley defines his purpose of Brave New World as “… the advancement of science as it affects human individuals. The triumphs of physics, chemistry and engineering are tacitly taken for granted… It is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed.” He explains that his purpose is to show how technology can be turned against the good of humans and forced into the course of mass destruction of what we know now as the world.
One of the big themes that comes from the grave advancement of technology is the idea of social predestination. In the book, people are no longer made by a father and a mother but purely by machines. These machines have the ability to make as many twins as in the upward of 16,000 per egg used. This is called the Bokanovsky’s process and it is one of the rhetorical strategies used by Huxley to get his audience to respond quite negatively and hate this process because no one longer has a family which is something very dear to everyone. In this process, those who are chosen to be lower class are the ones who go through the Bokanovsky’s process. They also have alcohol and other harmful substances put into their test tubes at just the right stage in their development so they are biologically inept. Of course there is not just a lower class, there is also many more social classes which are all determined prior to “birth”. This is very disturbing to Huxley’s audience because something they have always been taught (a person can rise up above their status in life and succeed) is no longer true, people are now biologically engineered so they can’t do anything more than they are intended to do in life.
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... His Times. Web. 8 May 2012. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers, ... where embryos are decanted. He explains the processes and shows them how the infants are ... of cancer when he was fourteen, his life in England and his social status, ... to see only one man for a long period of time. The last motif ... Quotes/ Personal Response Overall I enjoyed the book to an extent. The story was ...
Another metaphor that runs continuously throughout the book is the insect metaphor. In this, there are ceaseless references to people being insects. At one point, Huxley even says, “ ‘This hive of industry,’ as the Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work.”(pg.147) In this one sentence there are words with unbelievable insect connotations including the words “hive” and “buzz”. This world Huxley has created is just like an insect colony, no one minds being where they are in society and they are content with how everything works. They work for the good of the community and don’t think about themselves. The effect of everyone working for the community makes social stability. No one is jealous of other’s place in life and no one even takes the time to think about if they want things to change or even care to. With social stability, the dictators no longer have to worry about threats to their world; things should stay the way they are forever.
Both of these concepts form together to create the metaphor of the social body which is one of the running themes in the book. In essence, society as a whole is conceptualized to be a single person. Each person in the society is like a cell, mindlessly working for the good of the body (community).
In the book, murder is not of much significance because each cell is easily disposed of and is of very little importance to the body.
Aldous Huxley uses his expert knowledge of people’s emotions to lead people to feel a certain way about the book. He, in a sense, engineers people’s feelings to feel what he wants them to. His audience feels quite negatively about things that happen in the book. He insults the things that matter most to us, sense of self and our ability to choose what we want for ourselves. Huxley purposely takes this away from the people in the book, almost as a threat to his readers, saying, if you don’t do something about this then your life will be like these people.
The Essay on Lovely People do Stupid things
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