Brave New World And White Noise Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Brave New World And White Noise - Essay Example The authors show how technology has formulated men’s lives and ways of living and how this has influenced their emotions and finally the outcome of their relationships. Whereas Brave New World is a landmark fictional work of the modern literature. DeLillo has been awarded multiple accolades for his ‘breakout’ work White Noise including the National Book Award in 1985. In contrast, Brave New World was published in 1932 where Huxley seems to prophesize and communicate the major struggles which dominated modern life along with the arms race that so powerfully underlines the role of modern technology in today’s world. Brave New World is a fictional novel belonging to the utopian literature genre, where the society essentially portrayed is called dystopia (the opposite of utopia) where things go badly awry. It is a parody of Well’s idealistic work Men Like Gods. As the name suggests, the setting is an imaginary society that is organized or synchronized to create an ideal conditions for human beings by scientifically orchestrating the near robot like individuals who are devoid of pain, hatred, neglect, and every other evils in the world. It is a bitterly satiric novel that was written to portray the horrors that engulf a planned totalitarian society, where the individual loses the all subtle human emotions including the sense of love in the above process. On the other hand, White Noise is set in the 1980’s with a small American town as the main backdrop. This is not a fictional state of a speculation but records the real society in the time where the individuals try to decipher the meaning of truth, that is, death in this case. The backdrop is also the age of the 80’s, which as per DeLillo’s interpretation is an age obsessed by media and where the key drivers of the society are rampant material consumption and putting up a facade to get a position of distinction in the society. In fact mass communication tools co uld be most indispensable to democracy and most abusive in the hands of a dictator. In his novel, Huxley portrays individual images of the character but they tend to take a back seat to the overall horror of a fictitious totalitarian society where the interest of the state takes precedence over the likes, opinions and thoughts of the individual characters. In such a society all the components of a press is usually controlled by the Elite and serve a purpose which is bigger and irrelevant to a common individual. In novel, the author caustically portraits the stability in the society where the individuals are programmed to be devoid of subtle human emotions that essentially gives rise to a sense of pain. The usage of ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘conditioning’ are shown as a technique to illustrate everybody is satisfied with their living. Here science is used for furthering technology, the State talks about scientific progress, what it essentially means is furt hering of technology, not in increase in horizon of scientific understanding through exploration and experimentation. In contrast in White Noise, the technology proves to be universal in its occurrence where it is both threatening and uplifting at the same time. All through the novel, technology becomes inextricably a part of the quality of regular life as are the human characters themselves. DeLillo’s narrative seamlessly weaves between the sounds of mechanical and human sounds that