NAME: POCETTI AZUL

Riverside School, Year 12

BRAVE NEW WORLD - READING CHECK-UP

1. How is the theme of TECHNOLOGY AND CONTROL portrayed in the story? Provide
an example and explain its significance in the plotline.

In this dystopic novel, control and technology play an important role. To begin with, as in
many dystopic stories, the government and State control profoundly the society, in this case,
technology is one of their means of this domination. For instance, all the members of this
community are products of fertilization, and none of them are made inside a woman’s womb,
but instead in bottles. Five different castes exist, and each caste is predetermined to perform
certain activities the other ones cannot. The Alphas and Betas are the superior one whereas
Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are the weakest. For instance, Epsilons babies are put in
rooms with flowers and book and they are electrocuted when they touch either of them,
creating repulsion for nature and knowledge. This distinction is made since some embryos
are stronger than other ones, therefore the better quality in means of genetics, the higher the
position in the castes. By doing this, every single baby was predestined to their future job, an
extreme way of social control. Through technology, the Controllers manage to categorize
each individual, and settle them for a certain activity.
In addition, the government also controls the population when installing some social
norms such as feeling emotions or being part of the Christian or Protestant religion as a
deviant behavior. Instead, they installed a new “religion” which mimics the Christianity, which
is called the Fordism, which name comes from Ford, one of the first to put in practice mass
production, a key to their society. Some of the similarities are instead of making the cross
they make a T (because of a car model), having some “rituals” with twelve people alluding to
Jesus twelve disciples, among others. Moreover, feeling emotions at all was badly seen in
that society. They were drugged since babies with a substance called soma, which makes
them have hallucinations and diffuse all of their feelings.
Moreover, most of the characters cannot have an intellectual conversation, since they
cannot reflect or think by their means at all, because they were never taught how to. For
instance, Lenina exemplifies them when she answers constantly with phrases that were
induced by the government through hypnopeadia (playing recorded phrases to the babies
when they were asleep). This method was used to install all of the social norms into the new
generation to control them.

2. Establish differences and similarities between these two characters: Bernard Marx
and Helmholtz Watson.

Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are one of the few characters introduced in the
story. They are friends, and the most significant similarity between them is that they fail what
society is expecting from them in different ways; Marx is emotional and not as physical
strong and tall as expected to be, whereas Watson is way too smart for a society like that,
making more difficult to socialize, since not many filled his intellectual expectations.
NAME: POCETTI AZUL
Riverside School, Year 12

Bernard envies Watson for his ability to control and have stable emotions, for his
physical appearance (Watson is much more handsome than he), and for how many women
he gets. In a further point in the novel, when Marx brings the Savage (John) to the society
and acquires some fame for it, Watson believes he is becoming too arrogant and bossy.
Bernard has the need to stablish his superiority since he had always felt inferior to the other
Alphas, and Watson has never felt that way. In the end they become friends again, when
Bernard stops behaving in that way and they are both sent to Malvinas’ Islands because
they can bring social instability.

3. Explain the following quote: "Ending is better than mending". Put it into context and
link it to our current world.

This quote is said when the Director is making the tour in the fertilization center with
the students, and the records from the hypnopeadia tell this to the asleep babies. They
were specifically taking about clothes, and how they encourage society to buy new
things. "Ending is better than mending" is equal to “buying new stuff is better than fixing
the old one”. The government encourages so regularly this because in this Fordist
society consumption is one of the key point that keeps the economy running, as it is
nowadays. Mass producing give jobs to millions, and it is believed that spending and
keeping money circulating is beneficial to the economy. In the present, we live in a
society consumption and having new things is socially encouraged. Both society are
materialistic, meaning that they give a high value to the material things. The downside of
this is that many people from humble places cannot fulfill this, and not accomplishing a
social demands brings discomfort, and this is not an exception. Moreover, it is not eco-
friendly, since it generates a lot of garbage that ends up in places it should not, such as
the ocean.