A brave new world by Aldous Huxley

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In a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.

Not philosophers, but fre-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.



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 Bokanovskys 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 Bokanovskys 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 Huxleys 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 cant do anything more than they are intended to do in life.

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 dont think about themselves. The effect of everyone working for the community makes social stability. No one is jealous of others 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 peoples emotions to lead people to feel a certain way about the book. He, in a sense, engineers peoples 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 dont do something about this then your life will be like these people.

Symbolism: 'Ford', used in place of 'God', symbolises Henry Ford who perfected the assembly line and revolutionized mass production, indicative of a world where technology is worshipped like a deity. Huxley tries to show that in the Brave New World, even humans are mass-produced like commodities. Soma, the opiate used to control the people symbolises religion.

Imagery: There is a lot of animal imagery throughout the novel. Consider Huxley's description the Delta children who were staring with "the stupid curiosity of animals." John quotes the "goats and monkeys" line from Othello, delivered when the hero imagines his wife copulating with another man the way that animals do. Also, Mustapha's response to John's comment—"Nice tame animals, anyhow", are all examples of this animal imagery.

Metaphor: Huxley compares the people to bottles.  “Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry’s room on the twenty- eighth floor.  And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations.” Also in Mustapha Mond’s speech this same comparison is made, “ Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle-an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations.  Each of us, of course,”(…)” goes through life inside a bottle.” There is lot of visual imagery in the novel as well. One example this imagery is shown in chapter 11 when he describes the appearance of Linda. “Finally–and this was by far the strongest reason for people's not wanting to see poor Linda–there was her appearance. Fat; having lost her youth; with bad teeth, and a blotched complexion, and that figure (Ford!)–you simply couldn't look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively sick.”

Personification: Personification means the attribution of an abstract quality in a human form. One example of this from Brave New World is:“Eternity was in our lips and eyes”.

Hyperbole: Huxley also used a hyperbole when Bernard asked the savage if he had eaten something that had made his stomach upset due to his ill-looking face. Hence the Savage responded with “I ate civilization”. Huxley hyperbolized the situation, and by using such a hyperbole he made the scene appear more important.

You cannot allow people to go popping off into eternity if they have got any serious work to do.

Robert Dumitriu