Dystopian Society In Kurt Vonnegut's A Brave New World
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Dystopian societies stray from what current society considers “normal”. In fiction, they are used to represent a future in which people have been overtaken by a concept and have lost something that made them human. In Brave New World, the character’s lost their free will and in The Hunger Games, the society as a whole, lost the ability to speak freely against the government. In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, the world has been overtaken by anti-gerasone, leaving people young forever and erasing the possibility of death. Vonnegut uses the elements of a dystopian society to highlight the downfalls of the immortality the characters have received. One specific element of dystopian fiction is a concept that is worshipped by this new society. In the world Vonnegut has created, that concept is the invention of anti-gerasone, which leaves people young so long as they keep taking it. In this world, everyone uses anti-gerasone to keep them young forever, even the patriarch of the family, Gramps. For Gramps, “he was seventy before anti-gerasone was invented”, so consequently he has wrinkles on his face (Vonnegut, 294). However, he continues to use it and shows no signs of “leaving”, as the main character Lou…show more content… The main family, consisting of twenty-one people, lives in a small apartment. Vonnegut describes the living situation, saying that there is one private room reserved for Gramps, and “six mattresses and four sleeping bags… dispersed in the hallway and living room, and the day bed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple,” (Vonnegut, 299). These conditions would be considered heinous and inhumane by today’s standards, but within the standards of Vonnegut’s society, it is normal. The characters within “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” are also sick of these situations. In the story, the Schwartz family is arguing about