Chapter Blueprint or Satire? of Brave New World - Study Guide by Aldous Huxley

factor, and the capitalistic one that individual consumption is a social imperative. The names of the characters, both major and secondary, emphasise this: Marx, Engels, Lenina; but also Rothschild (the name of an international banking family) and Mond (the industrialist).

There are also echoes of the original Utopia. As Hythloday reports in Thomas More's book, work and leisure time are controlled: "Because they live in full view of all, they are bound to be either working at their usual trades or enjoying their leisure in a respectable way." In the World State, 'usual trades' are set at birth, and respectable leisure means endless rounds of Obstacle Golf.

Clearly there is a tension between the problems facing Huxley's world in 1932, and the solution to these problems implemented in AF 632. However, we should not expect our authors to have totally consistent opinions, any more than we expect ourselves to have them. Nor should the judgement of a work be unduly affected by information not in the text itself. Whatever Huxley happened to be feeling in 1932 as the world seemed destined for chaos, Brave New World remains a future that, whilst a dream for the inhabitants that don't know any better, is a nightmare for others. Certainly, had Huxley the misfortune to find himself decanted into AF 632, he would have found himself almost as disturbed as the Savage, John. Indeed, it is John's conditioning-free eyes through which this Brave New World is most clearly and horrifyingly seen. Like More's Hythloday, it is John who is the voyager to the new Utopia. However, unlike the fictional renaissance explorer, John finds himself trapped in a world where nothing is how it should be, where everything goes against the urges that John identifies as natural.