In case you missed the title, this is a freewrite and therefore probably won’t make sense to anyone outside of my head. So in advance I would like to say: My bad!
There are several themes, or questions, that have caught my interest while reading Brave New World. Some of them actually emerged from our Socratic circle last Wednesday. (Thanks, Pavin!) One of them is whether our society today is closer to the New World or the Savage Reservation. Along those same lines, I wonder if which one Huxley’s society was closer to at the time of his writing BNW. He most likely saw it as heading towards the New World, which then raises the question, did Huxley’s writing of Brave New World succeed in inoculating society against certain evils. Exactly what evils are those? And another question that has been nagging at the back of mind since about chapter 3: What gives Huxley the authority to try and correct society. I understand that he has every right to write a book (Haha! “right to write”. Funny.) get it published, we all do. But why should we worry about anything he says? How are we to know that he was seeing the world accurately, that he’s a visionary rather than a crackpot?
My thesis would revolve around the relationship between the societies in the novel and real world societies. I would also place an emphasis on the life and times of Aldous Huxley himself—gathering research from outside resources like (auto)biographies, the encyclopedia, and the internet—in an attempt to see how much the man influenced the work and how that affects the relevence of the novel now.
FIN. C];{D
