March Literary Analysis

Brave New World Chapter 9&10

Summary: Chapter 9

Lenina, disgusted by the Reservation, takes enough soma to incapacitate herself for eighteen hours. Bernard flies to Santa Fé to call Mustapha Mond. He repeats his story to a succession of secretaries before finally reaching the World Controller. Mond agrees that John and Linda are a matter of scientific interest to the World State. He instructs Bernard to visit the Warden of the Reservation to pick up the orders that will release John and Linda into his care. Meanwhile, fearful that Bernard and Lenina have left without him, John breaks into the cabin where Lenina is still on soma-holiday. He rifles through her things before he finds her passed out on the bed. He gazes at her, quietly quoting passages from Romeo and Juliet. He wants to touch her but fears that it would defile her. As he gazes at her, Bernard’s helicopter approaches, and John is able to run from the house and hide his trespass.

Summary: Chapter 10

Back at the Hatchery, the Director tells Henry that he plans to dismiss Bernard in front of dozens of high-caste workers as a public example. He explains that Bernard’s unorthodox behavior threatens stability. Sacrificing one individual for the greater good of the society is no great loss since the Hatchery can churn out dozens of new babies.

When Bernard arrives, the Director declares Bernard “heretical” because he refuses to behave like an infant and does not immediately seek to gratify his own desires. He tells Bernard that he is being transferred to Iceland. But then Bernard presents Linda and John. Linda accuses the Director of making her have a baby and the room suddenly falls silent. John falls at the Director’s feet and cries, “My father!” The workers break out into peals of hysterical laughter as the Director rushes from the room.-www.sparknotes.com

ACTIVE READING NOTES:

-everyone takes the reserve realization differently

-for lenina she is totally overwhelmed and disgusted by the reservation and as a result takes soma to relieve the stress and feelings

-bernard is more interested in how things came to be 

-john tries to touch lenina but is intimidated by bernard 

Brave New World Chapter 7&8

Summary: Chapter 7

At the Reservation, Lenina watches a community celebration. The pounding of the drums reminds her of Solidarity Services and Ford’s Day celebrations. The images of an eagle and a man on a cross are raised, and a youth walks into the center of a pile of writhing snakes. A man whips him, drawing blood until the youth collapses. Lenina is horrified.John, a handsome blond youth in Indian dress, surprises Lenina and Bernard by speaking perfect English. He says that he wanted to be the sacrifice, but the town would not let him. He explains that his mother, Linda, came from the Other Place outside the Reservation. During a visit to the Reservation, she fell and suffered an injury, but was rescued by some Indians who found her and brought her to the village, where she has lived ever since. His father, also from the Other Place, was named Tomakin. Bernard realizes that “Tomakin” is actually Thomas, the Director, but says nothing for the moment.

Summary: Chapter 8

John tells Bernard that he grew up listening to Linda’s fabulous stories about the Other Place. But he also felt isolated and rejected, partly because his mother slept with so many men and partly because the people of the village never accepted him. Linda took a lover, Popé, who brought her an alcoholic drink called mescal. She began drinking heavily. Meanwhile, despite being forbidden from taking part in the Indian’s rituals, John absorbed the culture around him. Linda taught him to read, at first by drawing on the wall and later using a guide for Beta Embryo-Store Workers that she had happened to bring with her. He asked her questions about the World State, but she could tell him very little about how it worked. One day, Popé brought The Complete Works of Shakespeare to Linda’s house. John read it avidly until he could quote passages by heart. The plays gave voice to all of his repressed emotions.-www.sparknotes.com

ACTIVE READING NOTES:

-introduce john's mother and how john came to be alive

-how she ended up at the reservation and the feeling of isolation, freedom, and truth

-in addition the feeling of loneliness and misunderstanding or stereotypes

Brave New World Chapter 6&7

Summary: Chapter 5

After a game of Obstacle Golf, Henry and Lenina fly in a helicopter over a crematorium where phosphorous is collected from burning bodies for fertilizer. They drink coffee with soma before heading off to the Westminster Abbey Cabaret. They take another soma dose before they return to Henry’s apartment. Although the repeated doses of soma have made them almost completely oblivious to the world around them, Lenina remembers to use her contraceptives.

Summary: Chapter 6

Lenina convinces Bernard to attend a wrestling match. He behaves gloomily the entire afternoon and, despite Lenina’s urging, refuses to take soma. During the return trip, he stops his helicopter and hovers over the Channel. She begs him to take her away from the rushing emptiness of the water after he tells her that the silence makes him feel like an individual. Eventually he takes a large dose of soma, and has sex with her.

The next day, Bernard tells Lenina that he did not really want to have sex with her the first night; he would have preferred to act like an adult instead. Then he goes to get the Director’s permission to visit the Reservation. He braces himself for the Director’s disapproval of his unusual behavior. When the Director presents the permit, he mentions that he took a trip there with a woman twenty years before. She was lost during a storm and has not been seen since. When Bernard says that he must have suffered a terrible shock, the Director immediately realizes that he has been revealing too much of his personal life. He criticizes Bernard for his antisocial behavior and threatens to exile him to Iceland if his impropriety persists. Bernard leaves the office feeling proud of being considered a rebel.-www.sparknotes.com

ACTIVE READING NOTES:

-Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,

Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.

nuff said-

Brave New World Chapter 4

Summary: Chapter 4

When Lenina tells Bernard in front of a big group of coworkers that she accepts his invitation to see the Savage Reservation, Bernard reacts with embarrassment. His suggestion that they discuss it privately confuses Lenina. She saunters off to meet Henry. Bernard feels terrible because Lenina behaved like a “healthy and virtuous English girl”—that is, someone unafraid of discussing her sexual life in public. When the genial Benito Hoover strikes up a conversation, Bernard rushes away. Lenina and Henry fly off on their date in Henry’s helicopter, and look down upon their world in perfect contentment.

Ordering a pair of Delta-Minus attendants to get his helicopter ready for flight, Bernard betrays his insecurity about his size. The lower castes associate larger size with higher status, so he has trouble getting them to follow his orders. Bernard contemplates his feelings of alienation and becomes irritable. He visits his friend, Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering. Helmholtz is an extremely intelligent, attractive, and properly sized Alpha Plus who works in propaganda. Some of Helmholtz’s superiors think he is a little too smart for his own good. The narrator agrees with them, noting that “a mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect.” The friendship between Bernard and Helmholtz springs from their mutual dissatisfaction with the status quo and their shared inclination to view themselves as individuals. Once together, Bernard boasts that Lenina has accepted his invitation, but Helmholtz shows little interest. Helmholtz is preoccupied with the thought that his writing talent could be better used than simply for writing hypnopaedic phrases. His work leaves him feeling empty and unfulfilled. Bernard becomes nervous, jumping up at one point because he thinks, wrongly, that someone is listening at the door.-www.sparknotes.com

ACTIVE READING NOTES:

-soma a drug similar to in todays time Ecstasy

-this chapter is full of the use of soma

-bernard and lenina take soma together with coffee then they go to hang out with their friends where they continue to take more soma

-in this chapter soma is established as a social norm

-huxley also establishes the relationship between soma and sexual activity 

Brave New World Chapter 2&3

Summary: Chapter 2

The Director leads the group of students to the Nurseries. Posted on a notice board are the phrases, “Infant Nurseries. Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms.” The students observe a Bokanovsky group of eight-month-old babies wearing the Delta caste’s khaki-colored clothes. Some nurses present the babies with books and flowers. As the babies crawl toward the books and the flowers, cooing with pleasure, alarms ring shrilly. Then, the babies suffer a mild electric 

The Director explains that after200 repetitions of the same process, the children will have an instinctive hatred of books and flowers. A hatred for books is ingrained in the lower castes to prevent them from wasting the community’s time reading books that might “decondition” them. The motivation for instilling a hatred for flowers is more complicated. The Director explains that Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons were once conditioned to like flowers and nature in general. The idea was to compel them to visit the country often and “consume transport” in the process. But since nature is free, they consumed nothing other than transportation.-www.sparknotes.com

Summary: Chapter 3

The Director leads the students to the garden, where several hundred naked children are playing. The Director remarks that “in Our Ford’s day,” games involved no more than a ball or two, a few sticks, and maybe a net. Such simple apparatus did nothing to increase consumption. In the current World State, all games, like “Centrifugal Bumble-puppy,” involve complicated machines.

The Director is interrupted by the cries of a little boy sitting in the bushes. It soon becomes clear that the little boy, for some reason, is uncomfortable with the erotic play in which the children are encouraged to participate. After the boy is whisked off to see the psychologist, the Director astounds the students by explaining that sexual play during childhood and adolescence used to be considered abnormal and immoral. When he begins to explain the deleterious effects of sexual repression, a man interrupts him. The Director reverently introduces the man as “his fordship” Mustapha Mond. At the complex, four thousand electric clocks simultaneously strike four, marking the shift change. Henry Foster and Lenina each head up to the changing rooms in preparation for their date. While heading to the rooms, Henry snubs Bernard Marx who is said to have an unsavory reputation.

The narrative suddenly begins to shift back and forth between three different scenes, splicing in Mustapha Mond’s speech to the boys with scenes of Henry’s conversation in the male changing room and Lenina’s conversation in the female training room. This SparkNote will describe Mond’s speech first, and then the two changing room conversations.shock. Afterward, when the nurses offer the flowers and books to the babies, they shrink away and wail with terror. -www.sparknotes.com

ACTIVE READING NOTES:

-the world that lenina and bernard know is a very forced illusion

-bernard recognizes that the world he lives in is fake

-lenina does not notice the false hood or is too scared to let herself admit it

-world is frightening filled with unnatural sexual encounters 

-the children play with naked bodies erotically 

Brave New World Chapter 1

Summary: Chapter 1

The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The year is a.f. 632 (632 years “after Ford”). The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is giving a group of students a tour of a factory that produces human beings and conditions them for their predestined roles in the World State. He explains to the boys that human beings no longer produce living offspring. Instead, surgically removed ovaries produce ova that are fertilized in artificial receptacles and incubated in specially designed bottles.

The Hatchery destines each fetus for a particular caste in the World State. The five castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon undergo the Bokanovsky Process, which involves shocking an egg so that it divides to form up to ninety-six identical embryos, which then develop into ninety-six identical human beings. The Alpha and Beta embryos never undergo this dividing process, which can weaken the embryos. The Director explains that the Bokanovsky Process facilitates social stability because the clones it produces are predestined to perform identical tasks at identical machines. The cloning process is one of the tools the World State uses to implement its guiding motto: “Community, Identity, Stability.”

The Director goes on to describe Podsnap’s Technique, which speeds up the ripening process of eggs within a single ovary. With this method, hundreds of related individuals can be produced from the ova and sperm of the same man and woman within two years. The average production rate using Podsnap’s Technique is 11,000 brothers and sisters in 150 batches of identical twins. Called over by the Director, Mr. Henry Foster, an employee at the plant, tells the attentive students that the record for this particular factory is over 16,000 siblings.

ACTIVE NOTES:

-all sexual desires and tendencies have been erased from human behavior

-sexual intercourse and similar words are considered pornographic 

-brain washing begins as a baby to ensure efficiency 

-huxely often relates Brave New World to the real world with Soma