A Summary of BRAVE NEW WORLD

A Summary of "BRAVE NEW WORLD"

In BNW we are confronted with a fictitious society in future London in the year 632 after Ford. "Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of the World State. Community means standardised citizens, all divided up into social grades a b g d e. Everybody accepts his assigned grade and respects the other one. Stability is reached by this conditioning of the "test-tube-babies" to perfect, contented workers and with the drug named "Soma". Individuality is seen as unnecessary and hostile towards Stability and so in this further development of man-kind replaced by Community. This total sameness is reached by the "Pokanovsky-Process", in which one egg is cloned to ninety others, hatched in a bottle and finally conditioned. The parents are given by the state to avoid feelings of love and individual treatment.

One of the main characters is the very attractive laboratory assistant in the London Hatching and Conditioning Center, named Lenina. She is - according to the standard of this future society - a pleasure-seeking person without careful choice. One of her man-friends; Bernhard Marx, and she get permission of the Director of the Hatching and Conditioning Center (DHC) and the World Controller (Musstafa Mond) to visit a Savage Reservation, a remains of the old society, which reminds the reader of a slum. Lenina even is disgusted by the unfamiliar scenery, the way how people live there, by dirt, dust, old age, and several diseases, which is all more or less unknown in BNW.

In contrast to Lenina BM is an outsider, because of his small figure, his individual thinking and his interest in the Savages' behaviour, rituals and ways of living. There they meat Linda, who was left in the Reservation, when she and her former man-friend, the DHC, visited it. After giving birth to their child, named John, it would have been a scandal to go back to the BNW and so Linda and her son had to stay there. First she had various problems to adapt herself to the "new" society, having only one man at the same time and to alcohol instead of taking "Soma". John is also seen as an outsider, because of his light skin colour, as it is BM, because of the fact that the conditioning didn't work. They become friends and BM decides to take Linda and John with him to BNW. As they arrive in BNW BM confronts the DHC with the fact of having a natural born son and as a consequence the Director of the Hatch and Conditioning Center is given the sack. But John is seen as a museum object and he soon recognises that BNW isn't as good as his mother always told him. He tries to make the BNW'ers realise how diseased their form of society is. Then he and BM are reprimanded by MM. BM is send to an island with Helmholtz-Watson, a friend with a similar way of individual thinking. John is kept there for some experiments. After a while dissociates himself from the BNW and lives quite alone in a lighthouse, mourning for his mother Linda, who died of an overdose of soma. Moreover he tries to forget Lenina, who isn't able to have emotional feelings such as love and only wants to have sex with him. When he is annoyed with photos and questions by some reporters he hangs himself in the lighthouse.