Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Happy Worlds
As I was reading the book Brave New World I couldn't help but think about Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and how they are both alike. Besides being both future utopian worlds, they both share similiar characteristics of the people and their ideas of happiness. The characters in both books want to stay happy all the time and avoid any type of suffering or unpleasant feelings; in Brave New World, they mostly escape these unhappy feelings by using a drug called soma as said by Mustapha Mond "[if] anything unpleasant should happen, why there is always soma to give you a holiday"(237). In Fahrenheit 451, they escape unhappy feelings by watching wall size televisions, talking on the phone, and hearing the radio. The goal of trying to keep everyone happy is a recurring theme in both books; Mustapha Mond and Captain Beatty (Fahrenheit 451) explain that it was necessary to get rid of things such as art and books because they carried messages of pain and suffering that they could not allow to show to maintain their happiness.
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As I was reading the Brave New World I also could not help to think about the book Fahrenheit 451. In both books they never acknowledge their surroundings. Their lives revolve around happiness and comfort whether it be trying to transform all the walls in the house into television or watch feelies and play obstacle Golf.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Brave New world I saw similarities too. The characters avoided emotions, there was one character in each book who thought more like us, and technology entertainment played a huge role in the lives of the “future people”. It’s a typical idea, the more technology advances, the easier our lives should become. It makes sense. But when technology advances, we should get smarter shouldn’t we? But in both books the people are obviously unaware, naïve, and we feel we know better. Why do science-fiction books about the future tend to take this route? Brilliant technology, not so brilliant people. Also, in WALL-E, the humans escape our littered planet to live on a cruise. Everything is provided for you and you are consumed by technology entertainment. At the end the people are so fascinated by all the stuff they used to know but now do not that they began civilization all over again. The people in Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are appalled by their own past, such as mothers and fathers, and in Fahrenheit 451 the reading of books and the concept of firemen putting OUT fires is inconceivable. Clearly, the more advanced we become in these science fiction novels, the more backwards our knowledge becomes. Weird, huh?
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