Weather and The Brave New World

Two works that I read and that kept me entertained were: Aldous Huxley dystopian work
“the Brave New World” and Jenny Offill’s work “Weather” and although the books have
many differences, they are quite the opposite. I would like to compare them and to present
further what differences and similarities I found between them.
In the Brave New World, the author presents us a society where everything is controlled by
the world state. This control is established thru some norms that keep people in line and
thru some ideas that were insinuated to the people, who only think that they are happy, but
truly they don’t really know what happiness and freedom are because every move they
make is controlled.
Weather on the other side presents us a simple life of a librarian called Lizzie before and
after Donald Trump was elected. The author presents us fragments of her life: her daily
struggles, her family problems, her concerns about the climate change.
Further I would like to present some differences that I see between these two.
First thing that comes thru my mind when reading a book is the way it is structured and
written. The Brave New World is a work divided into chapters and sequences in which the
author presents us in detail how the world functions. In the hatchery opening scene it is
represented how a human being is brought in the world and how he or she evolutes from a
little gamma/ delta / epsilon/ beta / alpha embryo thru a person who is out of individuality
and who helps the state by doing exactly what he or she must and nothing else. Another
example is the talk between Lenina Crowne and Fanny, when Fanny tells Lenina how she
should act and how she should sleep with more boys not only with Henry Foster the alpha
male, that she had slept with for 4 months. In Jenny Offill’s work the action is divided into
more fragments that can stand individual and the order of the fragments is not important.
This is a really interesting technic of presenting the life of a character and I think this was
one of the main reasons that made me read it. One fragment from Lizzie’s life was the one
when she explains how she goes every day to work with a taximan for whom she feels sorry
because he always says that he has no other clients except her. Although she has not that
much money to use a taxi every day and the bus would be cheaper, she prefers to help this
man. Another fragment that has nothing to do with the one that I already presented is when
she presents her relationship with her brother Henry, who was a drug-addict and because of
the close relation that the two of them have, Lizzie takes care of him. The only thing that
these fragments have in common is Lizzie who is the protagonist in both.
Another difference that is obvious, is the type of narrative perspective used in each work. In
Weather, the perspective is subjective, and the author is directly emotional implicated in
the action, so that the readers can be closer to the author and can understand better her
opinions and struggles. Because of the way she presents everything using the first-person
form of the verbs, the readers go deeper into her soul and identify with the daily problems
that she has in life, also because all of us struggle sometimes in some ways. Even if it is
because of money or because of the global crisis as it is for Lizzie or because we have too
much to do, every person feels that way from time to time and I think this book helped me
understand that the easiest way to feel better is to let out every insecurity and struggle that
we have. In The Brave New World, the author uses an objective perspective so that he is
omnipresent and omniscient and presents everything in detail without being directly
implicated in the action. By using this perspective, he lets his readers identify with whoever
character they want and let them decide if they would accept the rules of the world state or
not or if they will survive in such a society. He presents characters from both sides: the ones
that adapt, like Fanny who doesn’t even think to not follow the rules and the ones that can
not adapt, like Lenina who does not want to have sex with another man or the savage John,
who does not understand how people could be so cruel when his mother died because of
Soma.
Further I will move on with the similarities that I found between this two works.
One aspect that I found quite similar in both books is the fact that all the characters in both
stories have struggles that they try to overcome. On one hand Lizzie struggles with her
everyday life and with the fact that she has to play so many roles in a quite unstable society.
She is a librarian and personal assistant in her professional life, but she is also a mom, a wife
and a sister, who has to take care of anybody else and of herself and she also lives with this
idea that because of the climate change a disaster might happen in every moment. Although
the focus is on Lizzie, the struggles of other people like her brother who is a drug addict, the
taxi driver, who has no money, her husband and many others. In the second story we have
Bernhard Marx who cannot adept in the society although he is an alpha. He also wants
Lenina very much and is upset when other men talk about her. John the savage cannot
understand how the society can be so cruel and he cannot adapt to the way everything
functions and the last is Lenina who wants only one man and is a little bit bored by the way
everything functions, that’s why she also develops an obsession for the savage John.
Another similar thing that the two books present is the fact that the way the state and the
society functions has bad effects on the characters. As said, in the Brave New World at first
it is presented a utopia and how this revolutionary system, that the state uses, keeps
everything in peace and order and implements the motto of the book “community, identity,
stability”. Although it is described by the director as the only way to keep people happy and
safe, the people within the system like Lenina and Bernhard do not feel that way and want
something else that can be achieved only thru breaking the rules. Also, Bernhard is
portrayed as a cruel person who in my opinion is cruel only because he is the result of the
society in which he leaves in, and the system made him think he is a person that is not fit for
an Alpha standard and tries to prove to himself otherwise. In the second book Lizzie thinks
that because of the mistakes that the capitalist system made the climate change is
happening. She thinks that because of trying to satisfy the needs that each person has in a
short time, the system forgets what consequences might happen in a long period of time.
She also thinks about the carbon emissions from different big manufacturer and about the
fact that this all could be avoided if everyone would try to adapt or will be made to try to
adapt. She lives with this fear that at any moment a world disaster can happened because of
climate change, and she also thinks about how she could help her son Eli in a world as
polluted as this one. When Donald Trump is elected as president, she does not set her
expectations to high that anything about the climate change will actually change and she
believes that him elected as president is a step back in what she wants for this world.
In conclusion, although these two books have a different topic and the action described is
quite different, they also present some similarities. As their titles say: Weather presents the
stormy life that each human being has but also the problems that Lizzie sees in the current
world with the climate change and The Brave New World presents how a system that is
considered new and revolutionary can fail and how this can have a bad effect on the people
living in the brave new world.