Literature Analysis: Brave New World
1. In the Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, there is a "perfect" society. Everything is predetermined and there is no randomness or variability, they control how intelligent you will be and there are classes assigned to each intelligence level. The levels from most intellectually adept to least goes: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilons which are only used for menial labor. The novel is about an alpha plus named Bernard, and a "savage" named John who left the native american country to live in this perfect society. John hates how simulated and uniform everything is and despite his best efforts to go under the radar, the public gets to him again and in a moment of weakness, he hangs himself.
2. The most basic theme that I found in the novel is that imperfection is what makes us who we are, adversity is what molds the person we will turn out to be, and without it, we are all the same, living without a meaning or purpose. John saw this and knew he would rather die than live a depressing, meaningless, life.
3. Huxley's tone throughout the novel seems to be bleak, and almost hopeless. It is clear that he does not approve of or look forward to this type of society, and it seems that he wrote this book with the thought that this could be possible in the future if civilization keeps heading in the same direction. His tone reflects the bleak and depressing society that had been created.
4. Diction- Huxley's diction really displays his tone and personal position when it comes to the society that is in the novel. An example of this would be when he said "she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy face of Bernard Marx."
Syntax- The flow of the authors writing seems to me to be very deliberate and straight forward, often with some ambiguity as revealed in the excerpt, "Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turn towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west, then paused...".
Satire- Satire plays probably the most stand out role in this novel as far as literary elements go because it seems as if Huxley wrote this thinking that this was a possible outcome of the future, and one that society was definitely heading towards.
Repetition- This literary element was used frequently throughout the novel and really helped to emphasize the authors position or to emphasize the importance of a certain event.
Gotta love the penguins. Your blog is really light colored which makes you post harder to read. Try adding some darker colors to help make you text stick out. It's sounds like you knew what kind of tone the author was trying to express in his writing and it looks like you understood what the author's theme was and you were able to express it in your own words. The biggest problem is just amount of text. Its hard to explain your ideas and the authors ideas in a few lines so I would spend more time adding meat to your analysis. The summery is a bit short and I don't really understand why the main character was so afraid of the public media. (I think you need 5 elements for question 4).
ReplyDeleteExpanding on Justin's blog suggestions, definitely either make the background darker or lighter. Neutral grey is tough to read.
ReplyDeleteAnyway...I agree with most of what you wrote, even if it was a bit short. Your syntax analysis was spot on. One thing to look out for is that I don't think Huxley was writing about a future society, it was more like an exaggeration of what he already observed in society. It's just a small nitpicky detail to keep in mind.