Lit Analysis #2

Summary:Brave New World is a fictional novel that takes place in the future. Babies are not born, they are developed in test-tubes. They are developed to different standards of intelligence, the Alphas are the ruling class, then the Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. They are all taught from the time they are born on to be content with their lives. When they aren't at work they spend their time in superficial pleasures, nobody thinks about or discusses anything serious. The famous american businessman Henry Ford is worshiped as God. There is no history, no culture, and no love. Bernard is an Alpha, but he is smaller than the average Alpha so he feels kind of inferior. He takes a trip with Lenina to a savage reservation that is fairly dirty, but is also free. He likes the idea of being free. He ends up bringing a kid named John back to his civilized and controlled world. John likes it and seem to be having fun at first, but doesn't not like that everyone acts the same like robots. John starts to destroy tons of the drug Soma that everyone uses. Bernard and Helmholtz are called in by the Director and are both exiled. John stays and moves into the mountains. After sometime John sees Lenina and starts whipping her and a crowd circles them and watches. Bernard is found in his house dead because he hung himself.

Theme: IndividualityIn this book society can be described as an effort to eliminate the individual from society. It means the conditioning of those people so that they don't really think of themselves as individuals. This sense includes both the joy of one's own talents and thoughts, and the sorrows of loneliness and isolation. These experiences of individuality are what are referred to as "the Human condition," and everything in the World State is designed to avoid anyone ever feeling individual in any way, either through sadness or joy.  

Tone: IronicHuxley is writing about how humanity always seeks pleasure instead of pain, and then shows examples of how makes society just a bunch of sheep's. Only the outcasts can really think outside of the box, but even then, it's limited. Only someone who is truly not from that society can think beyond.


Literary Techniques:

Figurative Language: "Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one, Like drops within the Social River; Oh, make us now together run As swiftly as thy shining Flivver."

Irony: "What's the matter?' asked the Director.  The nurse shrugged her shoulders.  'Nothing much,' she answered.  'It's just that this little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play."

Alliteration: "There, on a low bed, the sheet flung back, dressed in a pair of pink one-piece zippyjamas, lay Lenina, fast asleep"

Metaphor: "In a few minutes there were dozens of them, standing in a wide circle round the lighthouse, staring, laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing (as to an ape) peanuts, packets of sex-hormone chewing gum..." "The ape had spoken; there was a burst of laughter and hand-clapping." 

Similie: "He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw-knew it, with sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.Twins, twins.... Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of linda's death."

 

Brave New Essay

            Fifty years from now the world that we have grown up in will probably seem outdated due to the production of new technology. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the society includes many of the same principles that we can compare to our everyday life. Our present world does not seem to compare to that of Brave New World, but many similarities exist. When you think about it, the fact that our world has similarities to this book, can be kind of frightening. Some of the similarities in the book and our own world include the decrease in peoples pain tolerance, teaching through technology, and segregation.
            Huxley introduces the drug soma, which compares to the painkillers that currently exist in our world today. The drug makes the user unaware of his surroundings. People have turned to the use of pain relievers even when they are not needed. Thus causing the pain tolerance to decrease;  most people think that as soon as they feel some kind of pain they should automatically turn to painkillers. It seems like life in Brave New World cannot function without the drug soma, and i think this is slowly starting to take place in our world.
             In Brave New World they use hypnopaedia practices to educate the society on how to live, just like technology is constantly feeding us with information today. Hypnopaedic practices, a voice under the pillow constantly plays and feeds information to the person sleeping telling them how to live life. This relates to how the technology today is always feeding us with new information at the click of a button. Hypnopaedia causes the society in Brave New World ti live the way the government wants them to live. We try to live life the most perfect way we possibly can, just like in Brave New World. Hypnopaedia tells people how to live their life in Brave New World, and in our society, advertisements and television try to tell us how to live ours.
              Social discrimination doesn't seem as notable in our lives as it does in Brave New World, it still exists. Brave New World consists of five social classes; Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The higher classes look down upon people from the lower classes. They do not appreciate all the hard work that the working class does because hypnopaedia has taught them not to. In our society we are divided into four major classes; the wealthy, middle-class, blue-collar workers, and the homeless. The wealthy class in our society may not look down upon the people in the classes below them, but they would probably not want to trade places with them. Some may not see this as segregation because they have become so used to the society that they do not notice these things. Just like in Brave New World, our society does not acknowledge all that the working class does for us because we sometimes take what we have for granted.
             Many similarities exist between our society and the Brave New World society which I personally do not think is a very good thing. This novel may make some people a little uneasy because Huxley has shown us our world from a different perspective, even though the circumstances in Brave New World seem ridiculous. When you look closely are they really that different? In Brave New World, love may not seem prominent because of the fact there is a lack of personal relationships. People express their love for someone by wanting to be with them. Whereas in our society, we express our love through affection and compassion. The circumstances in Brave New World show relevance to situations today, just in ways we may not realize after first glance.

I Am Here

I think this semester I started out kinda slow, I think due to the break, but I feel like I have stepped my game up since then. I have not started working on my senior project yet, I'm still trying to decide what I'd like to do it on. I am currently looking into finding connections to physical therapists that own businesses to see what they did to become so successful.

Brave New Essay Topic

Topic: Are the circumstances in BNW relevant today?

I personally think so, we don't have to worry about there being tons of the same person walking around. We do however have a class system, although it is not really like the one in the book. It depends on how hard you work and how determined you are. 

I would continue taking examples from the book and comparing them to the real world.

Lit Terms #6

Simile:  a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison.

Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage.

Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.

Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.

Stereotype: cliché; a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story.

Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them.

Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.

Style:  the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking.

Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important  structures of language.

Surrealism: a style in literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the nonrational aspects of man’s existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal.

Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it.

Symbol: something which stands for something else, yet has a meaning of its own.

Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense.

Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole.

Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence.

Theme:  main idea of the story; its message(s).

Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved
or disproved; the main idea.

Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the author’s perceived point of view.

Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; a.k.a. “dry” or “dead pan”

Tragedy: in literature: any composition with a somber theme carried to a disastrous conclusion; a fatal event; protagonist usually is heroic but tragically (fatally) flawed

Understatement: opposite of hyperbole; saying less than you mean for emphasis

Vernacular: everyday speech

Voice:  The textual features, such as diction and sentence structures, that convey a writer’s or speaker’s persona.

Zeitgeist: the feeling of a particular era in history