Brave New World
Annotation Guide: ELA 3-4H Chapters 1-4
I. CHARACTERS
1. The D.H.C.
2. Mustapha Monday
3. Henry Foster
4. Bernard Marx
5. Lenina Crowne
6. Fanny Crowne
7. Helmholtz Watson
II. TERMS
8. A.F.
9. Freemartin
10. Decant
11. Viviparous
12. Feely
13. Flivver
14. Pneumatic
15. “Crash”
16. Hypnopaedia
17. World Controller
18. Podsnap’s Technique
III. PLOT
19. How does the first page of the novel emphasize the fact that this society depends on artificiality to bring life to its surroundings?
20. How do the concepts of mass production and assembly line apply to the BNW society?
21. What three classes are Bokanovskified? Why?
22. Is the BNW science perfect? Why or why not?
23. Explain why Henry Ford is the BNW messianic figure.
24. Explain the metaphor of the turning wheels (pg. 42-43).
25. Explain the history of BNW as detailed by Mond on pages 46-53.
26. Provide at least 3 hypnopaedic statements from the novel so far.
27. What is the danger of people like Bernard and Helmholtz in the BNW society?
III. QUOTATIONS TO CONSIDER
28. “Not philosophers, but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.” (pg. 4)
29. “Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!” (pg. 7)
30. “…that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (pg. 16)
31. “Extremes meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.” (pg. 39)
32. “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy – to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.” (pg. 44)
33. “Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.” (pg. 45)
34. “Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.” (pg. 46)
35. “There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.” (pg. 47)
36. “Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists.” (pg. 49)
37. “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” (pg. 54)
38. “Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking – thinking!” (pg. 55)
39. “Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.” (pg. 69)
40. “Did you ever feel as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using…a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it – only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power.” (pg. 69)