Jake Lane Lane 1
Mrs. Marks Honors English II April 16, 2013 Heroes Not Required (Option #2) The Brave New World is a place of pleasure and stability. However, these pleasures have a cost. The inhabitants of this Brave New World have very limited life choices to make from the time they are artificially generated. Everyone is assigned a class that they can never leave, and the need for so called “heroes” or anyone trying to exceed the current standards of their roles is nonexistent. “Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn't arise; in this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn't occur to you to ask it.” (Huxley 8) This quote shows that age does not have a place in the Brave New World. The differences in peoples’ ages were eliminated because this could begin to create a dangerous thing: a sense of self-identity. “One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.” (Huxley 12) This quote shows another component of the elimination of self-identity. The Bokanovsky process is used to create a sample human, and then have the sample be multiplied, forming up to sixty-four humans with almost nothing individual about them. “Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the plant had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising” (Huxley 7) This quote once again shows the lack of identity in the Brave New World. While they are more individualistic than the lower castes, even the upper castes are limited to only ten-thousand surnames at the factory. This shows the Brave New World’s belief that while self-individualism is dangerous, the whole utopia should identify themselves as a whole. The implication of mass human production in this novel takes away all sense of identity, and without any self-identity, no one can take it upon themselves to go above and beyond their set limits. The destruction of identity wipes out any place for heroes and outstanding citizens. “Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual – and, after all, what is an individual?" With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. "We can make a new one with the greatest ease – as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself," he repeated.” (Huxley 127) This quote shows the disregard for individual life in the Brave New World.
