Enitre Book Summary and Synopsis of Brave New World
Enitre Book Summary and Synopsis of Brave New World
CHAPTER 1
The novel opens in the "year of stability," A.F. 632. The Director
of Hatcheries and Conditioning is taking a group of new students
on a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center.
The world's motto is inscribed at the entrance to the center:
Community, Identity, Stability. The motto seems to appropriately
state the nature of the hatchery, as well as the nature of the world
that Huxley creates. The center strives for community, identity,
and stability as it literally creates the people of the world.
The first room visited is the Fertilizing Room with its incubators.
Here ova are fertilized in test tubes to be grown into human beings.
The chapter gives a detailed, scientific description of the
fertilization process. Because of scientific advancements, the kind
of human being created can be controlled. Depending upon
society's needs, either superior humans (Alphas and Betas) or
inferior humans (Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons) are created during
fertilization. The inferior creations undergo Bokanovsky's Process,
whereby one egg will result in a hundred human beings because of
a series of "arrested developments." The Director of the Hatchery
praises Bokanovsky's Process, because it ensures uniform batches
of standard women and men.
The group of students is soon joined by young Mr. Foster, who is
enthusiastic about giving statistical details concerning the progress
and achievement of the Hatchery. He joins them on their tour as
they pass through a series of rooms. When the group arrives at the
Bottling Room, it is explained that this is where the eggs are
removed from the test tubes and placed in bottles in an assembly-
line manner. The bottles are labeled and identified, revealing the
heredity, date of fertilization, and Bokanovsky information. The
next room visited is the Social Predestination Room; here card
indexes contain all the relevant information on the quantity and
quality of all the individuals created in the hatchery. As a next step
on the tour, the students are taken to the Embryo Store, where the
controlled hatching of embryos takes place over 267 days. Thirty
percent of the female embryos are allowed to develop normally;
the remaining 70% of the female embryos are sterilized to control
breeding. The sterilized women, known as "freemartins," remain
physically normal in every other way.
Lenina works in the Embryo Store. While Foster is in the store
with the...