Brave New World Chapter 3 & 4 Notes

Chapter 3

"Strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness."
- This is a way to make people buy stuff.

"Polly Trotsky."
- This was a Russian last name.

"May sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible."
- They are making children not emotions of making a sexual game since they don't have parents and staying in the lab.

"Controller! What an unexpected pleasure! Boys, what are you thinking of? This is the Controller; this is his fordship, Mustapha Mond."
- This is someone that they met that has a name.

"In the lift, on their way up to the changing rooms, Henry Foster."
- This is also, another character with a name.

"From her dim crimson cellar Lenina Crowne shot up seventeen stories, turned to the right as she stepped out of the lift, walked down a long corridor and, opening the door marked GIRLS' DRESSING-ROOM, plunged into a deafening chaos of arms and bosoms and underclothing."
- She is also another character.

"
"The tropical sunshine lay like warm honey on the naked bodies of children tumbling promiscuously among the hibiscus blossoms. Home was in any one of twenty palm-thatched houses."
- The word promiscuous is a word that can make you feel a connection between the real world and Brave New World, and help you decide if you would like the novel's world better than the one you live in.

"You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. History," he repeated slowly, "is bunk."
- This is an anti-intellectual quotation from Henry Ford, who believed that a person who wasted time studying history would never create anything as revolutionary as an assembly line.

"Exquisite little creature!" said the Director, looking after her. Then, turning to his students, "What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible."
- "history is bunk" for another reason: people who know history can compare the present with the past. This also cause threats.

"The world was full of fathers–was therefore full of misery; full of mothers–therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts–full of madness and suicide."
- Families links fathers with misery, mothers with perversion, brothers and sisters with madness and suicide.

"Our Ford–or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters–Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life."
- This is another of the intellectual and serious jokes that Huxley loves to make.

"axiomatic."
- You repeat things for granted.

"Horrible; precisely," said the Controller. "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."
- When he asks the students if they've ever experienced a painful feeling, one says it was "horrible" when a girl made him wait nearly four weeks before going to bed with him.

"Rumbling and hissing, eighty vibro-vacuum massage machines were simultaneously kneading and sucking the firm and sunburnt flesh of eighty superb female specimens."
- Through Lenina and Fanny, the mechanics of feeling good, as they turn different taps for different perfumes and use a "vibro-vacuum" for toning up skin and muscles.

“Dr. Wells advised me to have a Pregnancy Substitute."
- Women need periodic Pregnancy Substitutes- chemical pills and injections to give them the hormonal benefits that pregnancy would give their bodies.

“She could never resist Lenina's charm for long. "And what a perfectly sweet Malthusian belt!”
- One fashion item is a "Malthusian belt" loaded with contraceptives, rather like a soldier's bandolier with magazines of bullets.

“Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman–always correct.”
- A woman calls Henry a "perfect gentleman" because he has other girlfriends at the same time.

“In the lift, on their way up to the changing rooms, Henry Foster and the Assistant Director of Predestination rather pointedly turned their backs on Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau: averted themselves from that unsavoury reputation.”
- Bernard Marx is another character.

“Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?”
- Bernard is unusual in this world because he likes to be alone, and he despises Foster for conforming to the culture of promiscuity, drugs, and "feelies"- movies that appeal not only to your eyes and ears but also to your sense of touch.

"What nonsense!"
- This is when Lenina starts to wonder about Bernard from the rumors.

Chapter 4

“THE LIFT was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina's entry was greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.”
- This is where Bernard and Lenina met in a crowded elevator and he was embarrass.

“But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him.”
- Bernard is like an individual person from someone you get to know of.

“To have dealings with members of the lower castes was always, for Bernard, a most distressing experience. For whatever the cause (and the current gossip about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate may very likely–for accidents will happen–have been true) Bernard's physique was hardly better than that of the average Gamma.”
- By accident, Bernard is small for an Alpha. This makes it hard for him to deal with members of lower castes, who are as small as he is, but by design. This is quote is also like slavery.

“Helmholtz”
- This is Bernard’s friend in this story.

“This admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? That was the problem which Bernard had come to discuss with him–or rather, since it was always Helmholtz who did all the talking, to listen to his friend discussing, yet once more.”
- He is different not because he is short and feels inadequate, but because he is a mental giant. He is successful in sports, sex, and community activities- all the activities in which Bernard feels he is a failure. But Helmholtz is still not happy because he knows he is capable of writing something beautiful and powerful, rather than the nonsense that he has to write for the press or the feelies.

"I suppose I've got things on my nerves a bit. When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them."
- Bernard got suspicious from someone watching him and Helmholtz talking to each other.

“Caste”
- Example can be aphlas and betas

“Benito Hoover”
- Huxley came up with this name during the war.

“Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.”
- Bernard separates himself from others.

“Helmholtz shook his head. "Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, 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.”
- Helmholtz started to have a weird, or uncomfortable feeling.