The D.H.C. oversees a demonstration of “Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning.” Nurses expose a group of babies to books and flowers and then add a violent explosion, alarm bells, shrieking sirens, and finally an electric shock. This experience, notes the D.H.C., will “unalterably” condition the reflexes of the babies so that they will […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 2Summary and Analysis Book II
Fooled by this stratagem, Troy’s citizens believed that the Greeks had indeed sailed home. Some wanted to bring the wooden horse into the city; others, rightly suspicious, wanted to destroy it. Laocoon, a priest of Neptune, warned the Trojans that the wooden horse was either full of soldiers or a […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Book IISummary and Analysis Chapter 1
As the chapter begins, the Director of the Centre (the D.H.C.) conducts a group of new students, as well as the reader, on a tour of the facility and its operations — a biological version of the assembly line, with test-tube births as the product. They begin at the Fertilizing […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 1Summary and Analysis Book I
Seeing the Trojans set sail for Italy, Juno commands Aeolus, the god of the winds, to raise a storm that will capsize their ships and drown them all. Aeolus obeys her. Many of the ships appear to be lost at sea. Neptune, the god of the sea, angry because Aeolus […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Book ICharacter List – Page 4
John the Savage The son born of parents from the brave new world but raised in the Savage Reservation, John represents a challenge to the dystopia. He is the character closest to being the hero of the novel. Lenina Crowne A technician, attracted by Bernard, in love with John. A […]
Read more Character List – Page 4Character List
Achaemenides (a-kuh-mihn-ih-deez) A Greek crewman of Ulysses, he is accidentally abandoned on Sicily, home of the Cyclopes, when his companions flee from the angry one-eyed giants. The Trojans rescue him in Book III. Achates (uh-kay-teez) Known as “the faithful Achates,” he is Aeneas’s armor-bearer and a devoted follower of the […]
Read more Character ListAbout The Aeneid
Long before Virgil’s time, Romans liked to believe that among their ancestors were the legendary Trojans, who, under Aeneas’s leadership, sailed from Troy, in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), westward across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and settled in Latium, site of the future Rome. This legend of Aeneas’s voyage, which […]
Read more About The AeneidAbout Brave New World
Historical Background The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication — the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production — also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. With the […]
Read more About Brave New WorldBook Summary
The first scene, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned according to the society’s strict caste system, establishes the antiseptic tone and the theme of dehumanized life. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in this world. Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus […]
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Aeneas tells how Troy fell to the Greeks on the night they invaded it by means of a wooden horse. Among other incidents, he describes the murder of Troy’s King Priam by the Greek warrior Pyrrhus; the death of his own wife, Creusa; and his own escape with his father, […]
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