Brave New World - Aldoux Huxley - Part 5

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 159

  June 8, 2017 

Book 47 - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
 Part 5 - 189-231
Reading Time - 1 hour

This book was actually a really easy read and I whipped through it. The end of it was a bit of a surprise. The Savage watches his mother die in a hospital and then loses it while watching some Deltas receive their daily dose of soma (happy pills). Bernard and a friend of his appear and all three are detained. Bernard and his friend are sent to an island somewhere in the world (basically jail)... while the Savage retires to some deserted part of Surrey, England. His solitude doesn't last long though and hordes of people descend upon him. The book ends with him hanging himself. Kind of depressing... I hope Bernard and his friend made out better on the island. While the three were detained, the Controller has a discussion with the Savage... and therein we learn that science and art, along with Truth and Beauty, were sacrificed for happiness... It makes me wonder at the US motto... Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Is happiness the be-all and end-all? Is pleasure all that it's cracked up to be? If we're always told that we should "be happy", but we aren't, it's not wonder that there are so many depressed people out there.

The second part of the book has a follow-up - Brave New World Revisited, where Huxley looks back on the book from a vantage point of 20 years in the future. I'll read that later... For now, it's on to the next book.