Aldous Huxley Nineteen Eighty Four example essay topic
Thinking his disease would effect becoming a doctor. "I would have probably killed myself in the much more Hard working profession of medicine". Huxley said. However, Huxley was no stranger to work, even in the literary world. The great author had an great productive writing career for nearly four decades, ending at the time of his death in November of 1963. Huxley lived and wrote in Italy for much of his early adult life.
He wrote in many literary magazines, including Vogue, but soon was forced to leave to America in 1937 to escape Hitler and the Nazis. As Huxley grew up an author, his writing became more serious. He fought to determine man's role in society and to find the meaning of his perception. His most famous work, Brave New World, Huxley proved to be decades ahead of his time. It would take years for the literary community to finally know about his work for what it was. Eventually Huxley emigrated to the United States where he lived the rest of his life.
He lived somewhere in Southern California. he found to be useful for attaining spiritual perception. His books he wrote later on in life 2 reflected an interest in man's relationship with the spiritual world. Huxley will go down in history as being one the most famous of the contemporary Writers, often writing things that noone of that time period could understand because His writing was so far ahead in the future. Other things he wrote were Point Counter Point, The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception, and Literature and Science. Many other works would have been written if it wasn't for Huxley's untimely death.
Eric Arthur Blair (later George Orwell) was born in 1903 in the Indian Village Moti hari. The Blair led a relatively normal. Although they were not very wealthy-Orwell later described them as "lower-upper-middle class". They owned no property, had no extensive investments; they were like many middle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on the British Empire for their livelihood and prospects. In 1907 when Eric was about eight years of age, the family returned to England and lived there. With some difficulty, Blair's parents sent their son to a private preparatory school in Sussex at the age of eight.
At the age of thirteen he won a scholarship to Wellington, and soon after another to Eaton, a famous public school. In 1922 Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. He didn't do what others had from his school. Instead he was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained in Burma, an served for five years in the police force there. In 1927, while home on leave, he resigned.
Back in London he settled down in Portobello Road. There, at the age of twenty-four, he started to teach himself how to write. For more than one year he went on living among the poor in London then in Paris. He moved back to London and began writing a few books. In 1938 Orwell became ill with tuberculosis, and spent the winter in Morocco. While there he wrote his next book, a novel entitled Coming up for Air, published in 1939, the year the long threatened war between England and Germany broke out.
Orwell wanted to fight, but he was declared unfit. In 1943 he 3 became a literary editor of the tribune, and began writing Animal Farm. In 1944 the Orwell adopted a son, but in 1945 his wife died during an operation. Towards the end of war Orwell went to Europe as a reporter. Late in 1945 he went to the island of Jura and settled there in 1946. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four there.
The islands climate was unsuitable for someone suffering from tuberculosis and Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the pain and heartache of human suffering, the indignity of pain. Indeed he said that the book wouldn't have been so gloomy had he not been so ill. Later that year he re-married. He died in January 1950. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley considered great by some, yet also a work of Disgust by many how could this be?
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and Nineteen Eighty Four, by George Orwell, are Futuristic novels written in reaction to the hideous events of world wars. These novels are Similar in plot, characters, and themes and are to some the greatest novels of all time. Brave New World is one of the most influential and powerful novels written in the twentieth century. It is one of the best known "dystopian" (implying "nightmare world") fictions George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley imagines a future world where children are processed genetically in bottles rather than made naturally, and belong to one of five classes according to their intelligence, from perfect Alphas down to stupid Epsilons.
Teaching is during sleep, but basically consists of enforcing certain behavior patterns through hypnotism. The legal drug soma that calms people through a fake sense of realization and helps to hypnotize the children. The story is about an unhappy Alpha-Plus man called Bernard Marx who is unusual for his genetic caste in being short and unusual in his ideas. He has fallen in love with a girl called Lenina, who he takes to an island of savages and he meets a handsome young savage called John. This boy turns out to be the son of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning and 4 Bernard manages to bring him back to civilization. The story follows John as he is treated as a circus freak.
John's desire is for Lenina to like his old-fashioned notions of love that come from Shakespeare. John becomes the focus of the novel as it leads towards its sad conclusion. This is as successful a cautionary tale now as it was at the time of its publication in 1932, and is just as popular. Nineteen Eighty Four's plot has three main movements, matching the separation of the book's three parts.
The first part, (the first eight chapters), creates the world of 1984, a totalitarian world where the Party tries to control everything, even thought and emotion. In this part Winston develops his first unusual thoughts. The second part of the novel deals with the his love to Julia, someone with whom he can share his private emotions. For a short time they create a small world of feeling for themselves.
They are betrayed however. O'Brien, who Winston thought was his friend, is really a chief inquisitor of the Inner Party. The third part of the novel deals with Winstons punishment. Finally he comes to love Big Brother.
Generally the plot is very simple: a rebel, a love affair with a like-minded, capture, torture, and finally the defeat. Apart from Julia, O'Brien, and of course Winston, there are no important characters. Indeed one of Orwell's points is that life in 1984 has become totally the same. In fact Winston is the only real character, all the other characters are half-robots already. So one could say that the plot was built around Winstons mind and life. This gave Orwell the opportunity to focus on the reaction of the individual to totalitarianism, love, and cruelty.
Orwell named his hero after Winston Churchill, England's great leader during World War II. He made up the last name using one of the most common last names, Smith. The action of this novel is built around the main person, Winston Smith, and therefore the understanding of his personality, and his character is important for the understanding of the whole book. 5 Julia is a women around 25, and she works in a special department of the Mini true, producing cheap Pornography for the Proles.
She has had a couple of illegal love affairs throughout the novel. Unlike Winston, she is basically a simple woman, kind of unimportant but loves her man and uses sex for fun as well as for rebellion. Probably the most interesting thing about O'Brien is that we have only Winston's opinion of him. This strong but sophisticated leader of the Inner Party is supposed to be the head of the secret Brotherhood dedicated to the overthrow of Big Brother.
In his black overall, he haunts both Winston's dreams and his waking moments to the very end of the novel. Big Brother is not a real person. He is only seen on TV. His pictures that hang around often shout out, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, nobody sees Big Brother in person though.
The main characters in Brave New World are Lenina, Bernard, Helmholz and John. Lenina is a everyday girl for this age, has no real emotions, and is suspicious and just what she was made to be. Bernard is her friend and an Alpha, it is common belief that a mistake was made and alchohol was put into his test tube. Cause he is shorter and a little different than all the other Alphas.
He is a little more open-minded and thinks about emotion. John is a savage from a reservation in New Mexico, whose mother was from London and got lost on the reservation. His only book is The Complete Works of Shakespeare and he loves to read. He is not conditioned (or brainwashed), and so is not used to this society. Helmholz is a Alpha plus, a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing). Helmholz and Bernard were best friends until John came.
Now John and Helmholz like each other more than Bernard. Helmholz is fascinated with John's Shakespeare book, cause all old books are banned. He seems likely to stick to John when the going gets tough. 6 Brave New World, Huxley states its theme as "the advancement of science as it affects human individuals". Within the last ten years we have seen a bunch advances in science and technology.
In any single ten-year period since 1900 the advances in science and technology have passed the advancement made during any previous hundred-year period. Huxley realized that these advances which were generally sought as progress were fraught with danger. "Man had built higher than he could climb; man had unleashed power he was unable to control". Said Aldous Huxley Nineteen Eighty Four is an complete thought on the nature of power, and a chilling warning about the way it can get out of control. Orwell was thinking of Stalin's USSR when he wrote the novel. By creating a nightmare dystopian fantasy Guide, p. 5 and following), Orwell was forcing readers to see how a ruler (Big Brother) has taken over society so well that every aspect of a citizen's life is controlled.
By directing us to follow the thoughts and feelings of his rebel, Winston Smith, the writer awakens in readers a sense of horror at how strong this totalitarianism is. The novel see's the many techniques by which the state controls people, its manipulation of the truth (by interference in the media, in language), by brainwashing, by the rule of fear (in cases of rebels). Winston starts as a rebel, who challenges the authority of the Party, but ends by capitulating totally because of what is done to him. The way the Party attempts to abuse its power as well as using force is a key part of what you should explain. The way Winston first challenges, and then bows to, the powerplay of the Party is also central to the theme..