Brave New World. Due 9/18/2007

I chose today to compare the first few segments of Brave New World with Lois Lowry's novel, The Giver. I believe these two books have very similar themes. Initially, the theme I get from BNW is that it is a society in which the authority is placed on people who have a desire for world domination and complete control over the choices people make, the education they receive, social status, and anything else that would require individual thinking or variety. Each social class is not only determined in a set sequence and quantity, but every human being is grown mechanically and uniformly to develop into whatever predetermined social class the Directors of the "hatcheries" and authorities above would have them in. The Giver also has a similar theme of ideas, coming from the egalitarianism and predetermined uniformity of the society. In both of these books, the dictatorship type government has gone so far to control and regulate society, that all human rights, thoughts, individualism, choices, etc. have been removed from society, and people are just robots working toward the goal of "perfection" and the "purification" of the social order. I haven't read more than the first 2 chapters of BNW, but I seem to get the idea that this book might come under the same criticism as The Giver has, such as concerns with the overpowering horrific suggestions and topics such as infanticide, euthanasia, and the idea that society can determine a person's worth and value to the world. This article attacks the critics of these harsh concepts by bringing out the fact that it is more important to educate children and discuss the topics, while emphasizing the idea that "in order to be fully human, people must share this knowledge, must be forced to make choices for themselves, must revel in their differences not fear them, must feel pain in order that they may feel joy, must comprehend the horror of killing the weak and the different simply to benefit the many. In the most profound sense, they choose life for the community, the tumultuous, challenging, maddening, often incomprehensible, too often violent, life that is Man's lot until we can learn to be truly good. For the community is not good; it is evil. It is, in the truest sense, anti-human."

http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/455/Giver.htm