Thursday, July 7, 2011

Brave New World 1: Creating a Mindset With Diction

It never fails that I start my summer work right before it's due, but here I go, I guess...

"A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth." pg. 4

In the beginning of Brave New World, one is placed in the setting of a laboratory and, therefore, encounters much scientific language. However, this form of wording reaches across the boundaries of events happening in the lab and applies itself to the entire chapter. The students taking notes in the lab conduct their studies in a seemingly scientific and uniform way. They copied down exactly what the Director said "straight from the horse's mouth and into the notebook. The first chapter was written somewhat as a series of processes. It described all the necessary steps in fertilization, incubation, and growth of the life-forms the workers created without missing a single detail. 

By using this sort of scientific diction and form of writing, Huxley creates a sort of scientific mindset for the reader as he or she continues to journey through the book. The overwhelming science theme in the diction hints at how scientifically centered and uniform this future world is. It reminds me of the movie Gattaca. There is a similar effort to create a scientific theme in that film with its uniformity. Both Brave New World and Gattaca begin with a lab environment to set the tone for the rest of the story. 

Although only a short way in, I'm enjoying this novel, and I'm looking forward to the scientific places it will take me.

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