Blog #2: Chapter 3

Ross Schonberg

Ms. Gubanich

English

February 4, 2016

Chapter 3: Multiple stories

In chapter three of Brave New World, there are three big different stories happening at the same time. One of them is while the kids are taking a tour of the Hatchery and they meet Mustapha Mond, who begins to lecture them about what life was like way back in the olden days (basically our time). Mustapha tells the kids that the way they lived back then was terrible and those people actually had parents. Another part of the plot that is happening is when Lenina and Fanny are in the female changing room, discussing her feelings about how maybe she doesn’t always want to have sex. Then there is a story in the male changing room, in which Henry Foster and the Assistant Predestinator are discussing Lenina, and Henry says to the Assistant that he should have sex with her sometime. As the two are talking Bernard jumps in and is disgusted by them and the way they are talking, he starts swearing at them, but they don’t seem to care. So in Chapter three all of these stories are happening simultaneously. This makes you wonder as to why Aldous Huxley chose to write the third chapter like this.

First, I have some ideas as to why he could have chosen to write chapter three the way he did. One theory is that maybe he did want to waste multiple chapters on each of these individual stories. Aldous could have wanted to save some paper, not wanting to make the book more lengthy and decided to put all of them into one chapter, which did kind of making it very complex. Another theory I have about this choice that maybe he chose to write this way to build some tension within the chapter. An example of how this seems to build tension is when we were reading this chapter in my class. As we were reading it, more towards the end, the lines seemed to get shorter for each story giving it this feeling of being very high-octane. Lastly, I think there is one big connection that is constant throughout the story, and is also mentioned throughout this chapter, within every story is sex. All the characters talk about is sex, like when Mustapha Mond is saying how sex is dirty, old, and no longer needed, Lenina saying that she feels like she doesn’t always want to constantly have sex with anybody and Fanny thinks is wrong (or crazy) for saying that, or when Henry and the assistant are talking in the changing room about Lenina and how the assistant should have sex with her eventually. This might be the strongest theory (not that the other ones aren’t good) because Huxley does always seem to mention sex throughout the entire book and whether it just something people do on a day to day basis or if is actually meaningful to some people, like Lenina.

In conclusion, we may never know the true reason as to why Aldous Huxley wrote chapter three like this (or we do and I just don’t know it yet), but I’m sure he did because he thought it made the most sense. I feel that this chapter could be a little confusing at times, but once you figure out what is happening things are much more clear. So I’d like to think that at least one of my theories is close to the true answer and that it will shed some light on Huxley’s reasoning for writing the chapter this way.