Brave New World: Society Today

When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he was making a point that our society was becoming more and more like that of Brave New World. When I first tried to find similarities between brave new worlds society and ours, I couldn't. The unbelievable level of government control in Brave New World made it hard to see any similarities that it shared with our society which boasts freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The first time that I noticed a similarity was watching the news. The news is something that many people base their opinions on. The news is also affiliated with the government. This means that indirectly the government is controlling the way we think. It`s can`t exactly be called brainwash and it`s nowhere near the extreme seen in Brave New World, but it is still a way in which our opinions are altered by the government and the media.

Brave New World: The Role of the Savage

The savage in Brave New World represents the fight against cheap pleasure and is on the side of freewill. This contrasts to almost everyone elses views in the book because all the characters in the book have all be brought up in the government controlled society, where they have been brainwashed into thinking that their way of life was the only good one. One main thing that is cut out by the government in order to maintain stability is culture. Art, music and theatre are all gone because they cause people to think. The peoples only sources of entertainment are drugs and feely`s which are mindless movies that they `feel`. Early in the book John the savage finds a play by Shakespeare. He reads it all the time and falls in love with Shakespeares romanticized view of the world. He believes in true love and happiness and beauty. When he comes into contact with the society all he sees is mindless drugged people who have no goals except to reamain happy as much as possible. In the end, John kills himself, and i think that this represents the authors view that we are slowly turning over to cheap meaningless happiness.

Brave New World: Implications of Absolute Government Control

This book is about a society that is completely controlled by the government. In our society, the government controlls what we do by passing laws that tell us what we can and can't do. In this society, however, the government controls its citizens through a much more direct means. The government actually controls what the people think and do by affecting their early devlopment. This means that everyone in society is just another limb of the society and isn't actually a free-thinking human being. Not that there aren't any upsides to having absolute government control. The society is much more peaceful because the government tells them to be peaceful. Society also becomes incredibly efficient if you can create workers with almost no ability to think to work the factories, never going on strikes, and always content with their position. The controversy is that when you control people, you take away their freewill and therefore take away their ability to have true happiness. This assumes that blind blissful ignorance is not true happiness.

Life of Pi: Brutality

"I stabbed him repeatedly. His blood soothed my chapped hands. His heart was a struggle - all those tubes that connected it. I managed to get it out. It tasted delicious, far better than turtle. I ate his liver. I cut off great pieces of his flesh. He was such an evil man. Worse still, he met evil in me - selfishness, anger, ruthlessness. I must live with that. Solitude began. I turned to God. I survived."

This quote really caught me off guard. I was surprised by the transformation of a young vegetarian boy that was so committed to religion into a monster. Pi's original good nature was so quickly lost to an ease of cannibalism and this really made me think of how much an event can change a person. “It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing" I did not expect this book to be so gruesome and have parts of cannibalism and murder from the knowledge that I had of the book prior to reading it. This passage really shows the brutality of humanity how people can change so easily with necessity.

Life of Pi

Life of pi has 100 chapters and is divided into 3 parts. Part number one tells the story of pi’s life before and after an unnamed horrifying event that caused great suffering to Pi. Part number two describes in great detail the event not spoke of in the first part. Part number three begins by investigators asking Pi questions, Pi telling the story of part number two and this part ends, the book ends with the investigators opinion on the story and the main characters life. I really liked the format of this book. The last part tying the whole book together by starting before the first part, and adding the second part in the middle of it in chapter 97 “the story” made the book more interesting to me. Another aspect I liked of the book was the use of listing. Throughout part two there was a lot of repetition, and although this made some of the book hard to read, I found that this really portrayed the sense of boredom and urge to survive that Pi was feeling.

Life of Pi: Unique Conclusion

"As an aside, story of sole survivor, Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."

This passage is the last paragraph of Life of Pi. I thought it was an appropriate ending, because it fundamentally represents Mr. Okamoto accepting Pi's first story, and by extension, accepting God and not accepting humans and purely animalistic species. Pi presents Mr. Okamoto with the possibility of shaping life as one would like to, seeing it in its most beautiful form. While Mr. Okamoto believed Pi's second, more tragic and horrible story, he prefers the first, and so Pi tells him to believe that one. It is not clear what choice Mr. Okamoto makes, until this final paragraph, which shows him accepting the tiger story which he at first finds so hard to believe. This passage made the meaning of the book clear to me. Although before reading the book, I was not expecting this book’s ending to be what it was. I really enjoyed this conclusion and made the book very unique.