Brave New World Narrative (through the eyes of Johnny Boy)

I walk into a factory to see what seemed like hundreds of identical workers laboring. Their work seemed like endless repetition. How do these people stand to do the same thing, all day, every day, over and over? I felt sick to my stomach. I may have been considered a savage but at least I don’t live a life of repetition. To cope I repeated to myself, "O brave new world," he repeated. "O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once” (Huxley 104). What kind of world is this, where the words “mother” and “father” are forbidden and feelings are not allowed? This was nothing like where I grew up.

How can two places coexist that are so different from one another? Although I was made fun of where I used to live, at least I could read and have feelings without being told to do otherwise. It puzzles me on why my prized possession given to me by Popé, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, is not allowed in this city. Mustapha says that his people would not understand the text. He says that people cannot read into history. I am just sitting here saying “why” to myself after every statement he makes. I question him and he answers, but he says that I cannot judge the new world with the rules of the old and that it just can’t work. I completely disagree, however. Everyone deserves the freedom to judge as they please.

What these people need in God and to actually feel some emotion. Soma should not be used as a scapegoat to get away from any problem that may come up. The Indians in the Reservations are able to battle their obstacles through their belief in God. Life is unpleasant at times, and it should be, but drugs are not the way to handle with that pain. The technology this city has does not have the ability to combat their battles for them, either. If one does not experience true pain, how will they know when they are truly happy?

 Sure, unhappiness is a bad thing. But it is people’s right to choose whether or not they want to be happy. Although the people do not know that they are unhappy because of how they are engineered when they are embryos, it is still not morally just to force them into this artificial sense of happiness. These people are essentially robots, brainwashed and emotionless. They even abuse the concept of sex, which is supposed to be a special thing done with someone you love. The reason something so intimate is abused by them is because they don’t have anything else to appreciate. If only they could appreciate God, or literature, and experience sin. I feel like if only they experienced some sorrow and grief that they would be better people. They would finally see what the world has to offer outside of the jobs that they repeat every day and the drugs that they take every night to help them forget about it all.

I had never seen anything as horrible as Three Weeks in a Helicopter, I don’t understand how these people prefer such things to true works of art such as those of Shakespeare. I wish I could have showed Lenina how it feels to be loved, but she could not comprehend due to whatever the government had been brainwashing these innocent people with. I knew somewhere deep inside that she wanted more than just a sexual relationship from me. I guess I was too much of a romantic, honestly.  I was comparing these robots, especially Lenina, to the characters in The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet. It was silly for me to compare these people to such complex and emotional characters, anyway. How could these heartless humans be anything like the romantics that Shakespeare fabricated so particularly?

It was at the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying that I had felt the worst pain of my life. My mother had been forced into taking the soma. I know she would not have done this voluntarily. She was such a lively woman. She used to describe London as a beautiful place. I try not to compare the paradise that she described to the reality of the monster that London is. Although it is still kept whole and intact, it surely is not beautiful.