Summary of The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
By Ryan Nunez
This essay is over an excerpt from Peter Edgerly Firchow’s book The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which he discusses the narrative techniques, literary allusions, and character developments that occur in Aldous Huxley’s novel, though especially the implications of these techniques for the book and author as a whole.
According to Firchow, the narrative technique and literary allusions that Huxley employs in Brave New World classify the book as a “modern novel.” Huxley’s narrative technique establishes Brave New World as a “modern novel” because instead of writing pages of detailed backstory to set the context, Huxley throws the readers headfirst into his world with little to no explanation. Readers are forced to make their own discoveries about the novel’s characters and society by overhearing their conversations and shadowing them in their day to day lives, a technique Virginia Woolf linked to modern novels in her work Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Firchow also explains that the many literary allusions Brave New World contains qualifies it as a modern novel. Firchow believes that these allusions are there to “reveal ironically the inadequacies of the present… by comparing it with the past”, and that Huxley used these comparisons to subtly lead his readers to certain conclusions about the reality of the World State using irony.
A common discussion about Huxley’s works was his “inadequate ability to create living characters,” something Firchow disagreed with for various reasons. The characters in Brave New World, for example, were never meant to be too complex. The novel is a fairly short work of satire, which does not really require fully developed characters. Also, the setting of Brave New World does not allow for the realistic development of complex characters; the way the characters are raised and the place they are raised in leave them little room to grow as people. Firchow then argues that the characters Huxley creates in Brave New World are still “vivid and even varied”. Despite being conditioned throughout their lives to be as much alike as possible, each of the main characters still have their own distinct, albeit faint, personality. Firchow even believes that Huxley chose to create “contrastive/complementary pairs” when he wrote his characters, one example being the relationship between Fannie and Lenina. Firchow concludes that the future that Huxley crafted is “not without hope”, because no matter how distorted the people in Huxley’s world are, their humanity is still able to shine through.
According to Firchow, the narrative technique and literary allusions that Huxley employs in Brave New World classify the book as a “modern novel.” Huxley’s narrative technique establishes Brave New World as a “modern novel” because instead of writing pages of detailed backstory to set the context, Huxley throws the readers headfirst into his world with little to no explanation. Readers are forced to make their own discoveries about the novel’s characters and society by overhearing their conversations and shadowing them in their day to day lives, a technique Virginia Woolf linked to modern novels in her work Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Firchow also explains that the many literary allusions Brave New World contains qualifies it as a modern novel. Firchow believes that these allusions are there to “reveal ironically the inadequacies of the present… by comparing it with the past”, and that Huxley used these comparisons to subtly lead his readers to certain conclusions about the reality of the World State using irony.
A common discussion about Huxley’s works was his “inadequate ability to create living characters,” something Firchow disagreed with for various reasons. The characters in Brave New World, for example, were never meant to be too complex. The novel is a fairly short work of satire, which does not really require fully developed characters. Also, the setting of Brave New World does not allow for the realistic development of complex characters; the way the characters are raised and the place they are raised in leave them little room to grow as people. Firchow then argues that the characters Huxley creates in Brave New World are still “vivid and even varied”. Despite being conditioned throughout their lives to be as much alike as possible, each of the main characters still have their own distinct, albeit faint, personality. Firchow even believes that Huxley chose to create “contrastive/complementary pairs” when he wrote his characters, one example being the relationship between Fannie and Lenina. Firchow concludes that the future that Huxley crafted is “not without hope”, because no matter how distorted the people in Huxley’s world are, their humanity is still able to shine through.
References
Firchow, Peter Edgerly. “The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”.” The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Bucknell UP, 1984. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. James P. Draper and Jennifer Allison Brostrom. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.