Episode 304: Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” Ch. 14-End

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Today on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina, Thomas, and Ella cover the final chapters of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. They begin the conversation considering the ending of the story and mistakes readers may make in thinking it is a despairing ending. Angelina asks the question “how does Huxley tell us to interpret the ending?” They also dig deeper into the rest of the last few chapters, including more instances of parody, religion and self-denial, and so much symbolism!

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Commonplace Quotes:

To read him is to recall the faraway childish experience of gloating into the lighted windows of an extremely brilliant confectioner’s shop.

Walter De La Mare

But in the future state, so say the prophets, 300 a year will buy 5000 pounds worth of liberty. And when we ask “How?” and “By what miracle?”, they invoke not the god from the machine but the machine itself.

Aldous Huxley, from “Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised Land”

If the Brave New World cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine “roundness” until a perfect fit results.

Jerome Meckier, from Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure

…a sense of unity is opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone “belongs”, uses the same cliches, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, realizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide… Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life.

Northrop Frye, from The Bush Garden

Books and Links:

Music at Night by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure by Jerome Meckier

The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination by Northrop Frye

Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley

Island by Aldous Huxley

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

The Life That I Have

by Leo Marks

The life that I have is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have for the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A rest I shall have
A sleep I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years in the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

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