Chapter 1

This blog will mostly be focusing on characters, how they interact, and how they evolve over time. I hope you will join me in learning about the world and characters of the novel by Aldous Huxley called “Brave new world”. 

The first chapter of this book seems to be mainly setting up the theme and atmosphere for the rest of the story while doing a great deal of world-building so as of yet there are no characters which we can clearly point to and say “yes that one is going to be the protagonist” or “that one has to be the antagonist” but there is still a decent amount of conjecture that can be made about the general attitude of the characters at large in this chapter. There are three characters of note in this chapter, the instructor, the student, and the technician. All three of these characters seem to be part of the uppermost class or caste of humans, the alpha’s, who seem to be those who are allowed to become the intellectuals and leaders of this society. The instructor spends most of the chapter expositing about how children are made in this world as the group moves through the facility. Something of note is that this instructor does not seem to fall under what is popularly known as the “mad scientist” character archetype which means you could infer that his way of viewing this world is most likely the commonly accepted view of this society instead of some deranged lunatic. Throughout the course of the chapter, the instructor will regularly talk about the other, lower classes, like they are no more valuable or important than tools for profit and labor. The student is the next character of note, he is characterized as being naive about the workings of the world (most likely in order to allow the instructor and technician to exposit about how this world works to the audience). Through this naivete, we can gather some important facts about how this society views things such as sex, sexuality, and reproduction. Early in the chapter, the student is asked if he knew how babies were made “the old fashioned way” and he acted in a manner that suggested that he knew but still was embarrassed to say, meaning there must be some sort of societal taboo on speaking of this knowledge. In a later conversation, we come to find out that in fact, the taboo part of baby-making seems to be not the act of sex but the act of birth as it is viewed as normal for five and seven-year-olds to play “erotic games” however what erotic games entail is not elaborated on. 

 

That wraps up most of what I thought were some of the most important parts of this chapter, I hope the next chapter gives us a bit more to work with in terms of characters and motivations instead of vehicles for exposition.