Friday, August 14, 2009
Emotions Make You Human
John the Savage was in constant struggle with his emotions because of the teasing he faced while he lives in the Reservation. He did not understand what he felt until he read The Complete Works of Shakespeare and it was then that he came to realize that the emotions that he felt were part of what made him human. Later in the book, when Linda is dying in the hospital from becoming poison from the soma she constantly craved John describes her as "less than human"(254). This is probably because of her escapism from her emotions through the soma. This can be seen today through television of computers so that people may escape their lives and has created the idea that television has the responsibility to help people forget their sad realities. But because we have decided to forget our emotions, we are being to lose our humanity and are slowly becoming more like Huxley’s utopia.
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I don't completely agree with you because there are moments when I watch TV, I feel happy or sad while I watch the events unfold which can relate to my life. I think that it's not only the fact that the people in " Brave New World" take soma, but they are conditioned to believe they are happy. Once they believe they are happy, they don't like their other emotions and then use soma.
ReplyDeleteEmotions aren't the only things that make us human. Imperfections do to. Linda probably seemed less than human because she didn't have the dignity to face her problems like Shakespeare's heroes and chose to run away. She was like an animal. A castaway that was abandoned and let its inability to deal with her situation eat it and transform it into something nonhuman. I can see how an emotionless person would seem inhuman to some and because of the drug she lost her humanity in the end, so I somewhat agree on what you are saying.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, television is trying to control our emotions because we choose programs that we want to make us laugh or shows that make us either feel sad or scared. However,the television producer's job is to keep us attentive to their show by drawing us in and relating it to our life. So forgeting our emotions is not what televion is doing it is just changing it for a brief time.
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