GENERAL PLOT SUMMARY

I. The novel dawns in the year 632 A.F. (after Ford, the deity of Utopia).

A. Civilization as we know it had experienced a devastating war which produced chaos and exhaustion.

1. After a further, so-called Nine Years' War, the dictatorship wrested control and brought stability—the era of Our Ford.

B. Stability is maintained by rigid control of the numbers and types of citizens and by the precise regulation of supply to demand.

1. Marriage is forbidden.

2. The system permits five castes

a. the more imaginative roles in the society going to the higher castes

b. the drudgery to the lower.

C. The population is controlled through adjusting the number of test-tube births and an artificial process for multiplying the embryos that will be lower-caste individuals.

II. There are many petty officials, but the real power is in the hands of ten World Controllers.

A. Peace is safeguarded through the state's process of conditioning all the young to think alike and in dispensing soma, a tranquilizer, to the old.

1. And for all ages there is the distraction from serious thinking provided by endless government-sponsored sports and entertainments.

2. Happiness is the aim of the state, and "Community, Identity, Stability," its motto.

B. In the opening scenes, students are being given a guided propaganda tour through the London Hatcheries.

1. Two of the employees there are Henry Foster and Lenina Crowne.

a. They have been dating each other with too much regularity, courtship being discouraged by the state.

2. Because her friend Fanny Crowne nags her about this, Lenina begins to date Bernard Marx, an extremely intelligent but slightly deformed fellow.

a. She grows so fond of him that she agrees to vacation with him at a Savage Reservation in New Mexico.

3. This is a preserve where those people are confined whom the state thought unworthy of conversion to Utopian ways.

a. It is crude and dirty and so are its inhabitants.

i). There are complications, however. Bernard has long been an outspoken nonconformist.

ii). He is contemptuous of many of the methods and rules of Utopia.

iii). Hence the Director of Hatcheries ("Tomakin") threatens him with exile (to a remote corner of the earth) if he does not mend his ways.

C. At the Savage Reservation, Lenina and Bernard stumble upon John, the Savage, and Linda, his mother.

1. From piecing together John's history, Bernard discovers that Linda was brought to the Reservation years ago by Tomakin and then abandoned by him.

a. Later, she gave birth to John, a crime preventing her return to Utopia.

2. Bernard obtains permission from Mustapha Mond, a World Controller, to bring John and his mother back to Utopia.

a. When Bernard returns, he learns that the Director of Hatcheries is in fact about to exile him, whereupon Marx produces John and Linda, who greet the Director as son and wife.

b. He resigns in disgrace.

III. Bernard and a friend, Helmholtz Watson, take John under their wings.

A. Bernard is very popular now because his discovery of John has so excited the people.

B. Bernard and Helmholtz show off Utopia to John.

1. He (John) is more disgusted and moody with each passing day.

C. Lenina has become infatuated with John and has made sexual advances toward him.

1. This destroys his image of her as an object of worship, and he spurns her.

IV. Following the death of his mother, John goes berserk and tries to lecture the Utopians back to sanity.

A. After an ensuing riot is quelled, John, Bernard, and Helmholtz are summoned before Mustapha Mond, Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled, but John must remain behind.

B. He is determined to escape Utopia, however, and flees to a deserted spot outside London.

1. But Utopia comes to him. He is hounded by the press and the inquisitive public to the point of mental exhaustion, whereupon he falls victim to the very Utopian vices which he hated.

2. When he comes to his senses, he takes his own life as the only way out.