"Everyone says Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that's hypocritical. French novelist Michel Houellebecq makes the case that it is wrong to interpret the work as a mere evil fantasy, as a warning about the future. "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent the right to have syphilis and cancer the right to have too little to eat the right to be lousy the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow the right to catch typhoid the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.īrave New World presents a very curious sort of dystopia. "All right then," said defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." "In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy." I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. Their debate ends in a mutually acknowledged stalemate, with John continuing to insist that the casual hedonism encouraged in the World State has destroyed authentic feeling: In a kind of Socratic dialogue, World Controller Mustapha Mond and John "the Savage" discuss the nature of the good life. Towards the end of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, there occurs one of the most philosophically provocative conversations in all of modern literature. Good dystopian fiction often contains a moment in which the vanquished hero is allowed to speak directly with an agent of the totalitarian system.
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