Brave New World Response

Brave New World Paola Padilla
By: Aldous Huxley Honors English 10
Genre: Science Fiction/ Dystopian
August 30, 2013

Reading Response Journal

“Stability,” said the Controller, “stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.” (Huxley, 42)

We are reading the book, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. It is a dystopian novel so it is about a completely different society and world from our society in the present. The passage I chose gives me different hints of what the book is about. This passage I feel is very important because it is just in page 42 so I haven’t gone that far to reach the plot of the story and how things work in society. This passage happens when the kids are in the Embryo Store. Mustapha Mond, the controller, is giving them the tour through the embryo store. He is speaking to them about the relationships between people in the past. How there were mothers, fathers, siblings and there were romances. Mustapha described this as a morally wrong thing and they never lived stably or joyful. He described this with a pressure pipe. He asked the kids to imagine a pressure pipe. Then he had to imagine it with a hole and water sprouting out of it. This wasn’t a good thing. Then, they had to imagine the pipe with a lot of holes. This would be even worse. This was how a person in the “past” would be like. If something harmful happened to a child, the mother would be devastated, or if a couple was going through a hard time they began to hurt and feel overwhelmed. These types of things were not acceptable in this Dystopian world. They would all be happy. For this they created people that looked exactly the same, so that no one would feel insecure about themselves. This is when the passage comes in. The kids were all astonished about how things used to be. Then Mustapha said that the key to a happy society there needed to be stability. This passage showed me the way people think in the book. They obviously changed a lot from how we are right now and they have different morals. They believe that the best way to have a good society is being stable and everyone being merry. I think this passage is also reflecting in our daily lives and is somehow right. Right now the lives of many people are being rough, not only in Mexico but in the whole world. Poverty, discrimination, bullying, in between other things, are some of the issues in the world going on right now. The main reason for these problems is that people are not stable. They spend things as if they were rich and not manage their lives correctly. Some people spend their money as if they were rich, and when they need it the most they complain about their miserable lives and how they don’t have money. Some people have many opportunities in life they show off and once they lose these opportunities they complain. People need to be stable and balance their lives in order to have individual stability. People become into totally different people when they are not stable. They complain, they have mood swings and they are not happy with their lives. They need to feel stable with themselves and their feelings in order to be stable in their lives. Being stable leads to a healthier life and this leads to success and therefore stability because they are okay with themselves and how they are living. You can notice how people in this book are stable with themselves because it is a society where no one feels different or discriminated because they are all the same. This is somehow wrong because we have to learn how to be stable and how to feel indifferent about people, no matter the race, the nationality, the language or even the height. We are all people and we need to learn how to be stable. This passage speaks the truth about the key to success in life. Many people feel bad about themselves and feel miserable, but the only way to solve this problem and have a joyful life is by being stable with themselves.