Strict Social Class In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Strict social classes often produce unrealistic expectations that foster insecurities.
Societal pressures and restrictive social classes incite dissatisfaction and in order for change to occur, self-awareness is necessary. Aldous Huxley’s most well-known novel Brave New World, deals with a highly structured caste system in an incredibly technologically advanced society, the World State. The government of the World State uses strategies such as hypnopæida, or sleep teaching, to maintain social stability and happiness for all. The novel is largely centered around Bernard, a young man of the Alpha class, the highest caste in the World State. He and Lenina, a Beta, a slightly lower caste, travel to a Reservation is Mexico where the meet John,

John is taken to the World State, a society very different from the Reservation in which he grew up, and faces the challenges of adjusting to a new society. Eventually, when he is fed up with the seemingly horrifying practices of the World State, he has an argument with Mustapha Mond, the leader of the World State, about their philosophies regarding happiness in which John says, “‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I was real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin’” (Brave New World, 215). This demonstrates John’s great self-awareness of ability to articulate why is he is unhappy and how he desires change. This ultimately leads to his relocation -- freedom from the societal pressures and norms that he is disgusted by. The key difference between John and the other citizens of the World State, who don’t desire change, is that John is willing to risk everything for true happiness, not the artificial happiness imposed upon him by the World State. John ends up taking his life, and is able to possibly find the happiness he has been after in another life. There may be advantages to this sheltered thought of Lenina and many others, because ultimately John commits suicide. However, this may be, in his eyes, a victory

Denis is similar to Bernard because he feels he was born different: “Why was [Denis] born with a different face? Why was he? Gombauld had a face of brass--one of those old, brazen rams that thumped against the walls of cities till they fell. He was born with a different face--a wooly face” (Crome Yellow, 53). However there is a fundamental difference between the two because Bernard is able to make a change in his life, while Denis is not. His inability to assert himself and create change in himself is because Denis often removes himself from reality. Meckier notes that “Denis regards words as though they were things. They become his substitute for reality and his conversation deteriorates into one long fallacy of misplaced concreteness. . . . Denis’ centrifugal use of language takes him away from reality and into a private world” (Meckier 83). His removal from society inhibits his ability to effectively interact with others and forces him to be insecure and shy. However, while Denis’s timidity does emerge because of his own insecurities, the societal pressures among the people he surrounds himself with. Meckier indicates that “Rehearsed scenes, ready-made phrases, words instead of things-- these are the barriers Denis imposes between himself and life. He is the first in a series of Huxley characters who personify a paradoxical union of egotism and