Tuesday, December 1, 2015

How does Huxley create a dramatic sense of contrast in the first eleven chapters of Brave New World?

You might want to think about analysing Chapter Seven in
depth, which is when Lenina and Bernard visit the publo in the reservation, and both are
exposed to "real" life as opposed to the perfect life that they have been living in the
city. It is highly amusing that Lenina finds fault with everything that they see. She
doesn't like their guide, who smells in her opinion, and she is shocked to see an old
man whose face has so many wrinkles it is described as being like "a mask of obsidian."
We see the contrast between "civilisation" and the savagery of the reservations built
up. Note how Bernard describes the old man's age and why old people from their home do
not look like this man:


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That's because we don't allow them to be like
that. We preserve them from diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially
balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don't permit their magnesium-calcium ration to
fall below what it was at thirty. We give them transfusions of young blood. We keep
their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don't look like
that.



Lenina is left to "face
the horrors" of this pueblo without soma, as she is shocked again and again by normal
scenes of life as it is for us. The contrast thus helps to underline how society has
changed so radically and how advanced it has become.

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