When confronted by the idea of suffering, Lenina is only able to produce the single response of resorting to soma for happiness, while John who was raised outside of the World State embraces suffering as a part of being human, demonstrating how the World State has annihilated the people of the state’s ability to see things from other perspectives apart from the World State’s, resulting in a lack of individuality.
It is hard to imagine what living life in constant fear of death and arrest would be like, knowing that any slight slip in actions or speech could result in the end of one’s life as they knew it. Eugenia Ginzburg is an active communist member who finds herself on the wrong side of this situation. Arrested for over exaggerated claims of being a trotskyist terrorist, she is immediately thrust into a spiral of events that will dramatically change her, her ideals, and the entire state of communism. However, while in the prisons and labor camps it is interesting to note how her perceptions of life and reality change, including her affiliation to the state. This naturally begs the question; How do Ginzburg's perceptions of Communism and the Stalinist regime change throughout
In today’s world one of the most important things is education and they way citizens’ think. One example, of a control method in both society’s is to control citizens’ consciousness and education. In the society of “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” citizens have happy consciousness, but are educated of the child who has to suffer. Which makes citizens’ of Omelas feel bad because of the suffering the child has to experience. As stated in “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” “The know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the one one, the flute-player could make no joyful music…”(3) This quote shows that the suffering that child goes through is for the benefit of the others of Omelas. In contrast to the “Brave New World”
In Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley, Lenina is nineteen years old, she is described as “uncommonly pretty.” She is in the beta class and the female archetype, a new type of civilized person in the New World society, both intellectually and sexually. Bernard Marx is interested in her, and Lenina in him. They travel to the reservation and later have sex. However, Lenina is discovering that John does not want to have sex with her, she is hurt and confused. When she was young, Lenina went through sleep training, which made her brain accustomed to certain sayings and feelings. She was accustomed to men wanting to go to bed with her. When she wants instant gratification, she consumes soma, a drug used in the society to make people feel better. When she traveled to John’s residents, she had high hopes for the situation to come. However, John strikes her. Lenina in Brave New World is a classic example of a common naïve young teenage girl who is set in her ways and expects everyone to want her, but through reality and drug use, falls apart.
Lenina is supportive of the way matters are handled in her society. She repeats hypnopaedic sayings with pride and refuses to hear about anyone’s unhappiness with societal matters. The totalitarian rule of the world state is similar to communism and Lenina’s name is alike that of Vladimir Lenin, a famous communist ruler. Huxley alludes to this man to illustrate the ideology of the people in this time. They are all supportive of the state of the government, but they do not realize that this is only the case due to their brainwashing. If they could understand how their lives are all pretend, there would be massive consequences for those in power. In addition to this, Shakespeare is referenced frequently throughout the novel by John. Near the end of the story, John and Helmholtz suggest bringing some of Shakespeare’s works back. The Controller denies this request because the return of his tragedies would bring back social instability. He feels that the stories would only bring unhappiness and other feelings which could lead to a loss of power. When people do not know exactly what they are missing, they are unable to fight for it, resulting in more power for those in
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anna Funder’s Stasiland explore the physical and psychological suffering one can endure from a totalitarian government. The objective of the totalitarian governments in the two novels was to implement pain and hardship as a means of controlling the masses. The Party in Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, implemented a dominance of physical suffering forcing different beliefs and betrayal. Whilst in Funder’s Stasiland, The German Democratic Republic achieved the same suffering by physical torture alongside psychological discomfort through death and separation from loved ones. These two applications of suffering are distant from one another, achieving different outcomes. Orwell presents a dark undesirable society where physical suffering is temporary, but the damages that are associated with it are permanent. Whilst, Funder portrays that the human spirit is not as strong as it was before the wall. The suffering implemented in both novels have a profound effect on the characters and influence future life decisions, precipitating permanent effects on one’s psychological mindset caused by the State.
It’s shocking how two people from different societies can be both similar and different at the same time. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Linda and Lenina are two such characters. Each of them have their own characteristics which make them unique, but they also have separate characteristics. The three ways in which Lenina and Linda can be compared would be physically, intelligently, and emotionally.
Many of Man's struggles are usually the result of societal standards, control, and punishment. These struggles are present in both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through setting and internal monologue, both authors depict the effects of the brutalities of communism on Man's spirituality.
A constant state of distress and hardship may be present in a person’s life, whether it be because of poverty, sickness, or guilt, and it is collectively known as suffering. This topic of suffering comes up often in the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He presents an array of characters suffering for a majority of their life for various reasons. He also demonstrates a fear of death in some characters’ minds, but when death and suffering come together, that fear is blocked out. Dostoyevsky portrays the theme that when people are suffering, they have no reason to fear death.
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We depicts a dystopian world ruled by the One State through the eyes and conscience of mathematician and protagonist D-503. We was written in 1921, after Russia saw the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, led by the Marxist Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. (Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.) Zamyatin’s constructed ideals of the One State parallels that of his own country, under the totalitarian regime imposed by the communist government, in order to convey his satirical political opinions of its worsening and limiting effect. In We, Zamyatin demonstrates the importance of imagination and free thought, developing the audience’s understanding of the limits of happiness under the rule of a totalitarian society seen through the eyes of D-503. The motif of imagination is seen within the novel through Zamyatin’s manipulation of D-503’s perception of his world, specifically his auditory perception and his description through mathematical diction, critiquing the oppressive totalitarian society.
Bernard, Lenina, and Linda all have unique characteristics that set them apart from the regular citizens of the World State Society. However, all three of them have unknowingly fallen into the conformities of the state’s maladaptive rules, preferably choosing to emanate the state’s values that do not fit their own characteristics. The World State’s guidelines and regulations pull all the citizens of the World State, including Bernard, Lenina, and Linda, into one lifestyle of living through a domino effect of conformity: the more people that conform, the more harder it is to resist the urge to conform with them. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
Set at the end of the Cold War in East Germany, the movie Goodbye Lenin is the story of a young man, Alex, trying to protect his mother, Christiane, who just spent the last eight months in a coma. Christiane is a personification of the values and ideology of socialism. She carries them out in her interactions with society, and is very hopeful towards the success of the regime. During her absence, the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the German Democratic Republic leads to a radical and turbulent change in society: the fall of socialism and the triumph of capitalism. Because of the shocking effect of such information and the danger of another heart attack, Alex creates for Christiane an ideological form of socialism. Fundamental themes in the movie are the difference between ideal and reality of socialism, as well as the positive and negative aspects of the transition to free market capitalism. Such themes are carried out through a juxtaposition of an ideal society and its reality in the form of a constructed reality of socialism. This idealized version of socialism served as an oasis from the chaotic transition from a problematic socialist regime to free market capitalism.
Heroes come in many shapes and sizes, throughout time many of them have risen and fallen. A hero is characterized as someone that is a leader to his people, they reflect societal views, and yet they have a major flaw that often causes their downfall. During the 20th century a revolutionary man rose from his years of exile to lead the Bolshevik party into power, his name, Vladimir Lenin. Lenin stands as a prime example of a leader that reflects Russia’s social values, and as a flaw for his outspoken nature suffers from a near-death assassination.
In this paper, I plan to explain Dostoevsky’s criticism of Western Individualism. Dostoevsky’s first criticism resides in the idea to “love life more than the meaning of it, “which is presented by the character Alyosha (Dostoevsky 3). Allowing this character to discuss this topic, along with the commentary of Ivan, demonstrates their mindset to solely focus on their own lives, opposed to caring for others. This leads to them living for the now, and not focusing on how their decisions will affect their future or others. Dostoevsky disapproves of this notion because living by this mentality encourages the guidance of logic, which is dangerous because it could tell you to kill yourself. From Dostoevsky’s Eastern Orthodox background, he believes that the only way from living from this situation is to deny it. By denying this way of living, the focus toward life will not be directed toward yourself, but toward the way you can impact the environment around you. Ivan clearly does not believe in these values, due to his intentions to commit suicide at the age of thirty. As said before, living by the idea to “love life more than the meaning of it” leads to death, and Ivan indulges in this to the fullest (Dostoevsky 3).
The conversation between Mustapha Mond, a “World Controller” and John, the “Savage” examines the sacrifices for stability in the society of the novel Brave New World. Mustapha Mond justifies the government’s restrictions by describing the apparent “happiness” of the public. Ultimately, he claims that they have achieved stability in that the public has no need for worries and in result must be happy. Similarly, Mustapha alludes to the fact that classic conditioning was used on the public to conform to the government’s laws, the reasoning for their lack of worries. He mentions the consumption and the public’s dependence of “soma”, a drug that causes lethargy and inhibits awareness, aiding to distract the unhappy. He scoffs at how ridiculous
The life of a savage has an entirely different set of morals, beliefs and limitations compared to the life of a person living in Brave New World. John, a character in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, has never been to or has been trained in Brave New World. John was exposed to old literature, the experience of working for things and having a choice of doing things. Unlike John, Lenina was trained hypnopædically to never have to worry about anything and to love everything about her life. Lenina doesn’t know anything about things of the past like the bible or Shakespeare.