Humanities Homework Help

Reading Questions for Brave New World, Chapters 4-6 (a sentence or two to a paragraph for each question will be sufficient):

1. In Chapter 4, we get to know a few new characters in more detail, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson. In what way(s) are these two characters similar? In what way(s) are they different? Support your response with a reference to a passage or page number in the book.

2. In Part 2 of Chapter 5, Bernard Marx visits a “Solidarity Service” where the goal is to reach “atonement.” What is the purpose of such a service? What is “atonement,” and why is Bernard Marx unable to achieve it?

3. Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey, Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world–the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! “Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted…” But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted…. They were inside, here and now–safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their sexophones and the Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues, they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottle ocean of blood-surrogate.” (Chapter 5, p.77)

Lenina shook her head. “Was and will make me ill,” she quoted, “I take a gramme and only am.”
In the end she persuaded him [Bernard] to swallow four tablets of soma. Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed. (Chapter 6, p. 104)

The drug soma is distributed by the government and taken by the citizens in Brave New World to distract them from feeling any discomfort, anxiety, or unhappiness. What is your personal reaction to the use of soma in this novel? If such a drug existed in today’s world (something “euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant”) do you think most people would take it? Would YOU take it? (P.S. You don’t have to answer that question if you don’t want to.) Lastly, can you think of any modern-day equivalents to soma, some widely-used substance or distraction that keeps people anesthetized and temporarily free of emotional pain?

P.S. As you answer the questions above, I’m mostly interested in your ability to use inference to draw conclusions about what’s happening in this novel. Anyone can go to the internet to look up answers to iconic books like this one; when I grade this response, I’ll be looking at HOW you drew your conclusions, what passages or elements of the text caused you to draw the conclusion that you did.

Cool words to look up (optional):

ruminate (p. 60)

atonement (79)

indefatigable (80)

plangently (80)

galvanic (82)

solecism (96)

pneumatic (96)

fulminate (105)