Motifs:
There are several motifs that have appeared so far, including the sky, metals, music, and the image of going "down". But the ones that stood out most to me so far are lips and windows. First, lips are used often to characterize women. Never men, I've noticed, but always women. For instance, O has round pink lips that make her seem innocent, while I-330 has blood red, sharp lips to show that she is more dangerous. The old woman at the Ancient House has no lips, because they are so wrinkled and sucked inside. Then windows have appeared very often, since it seems that all the buildings are made from glass. The act of "closing your blinds" is only done when you're going to have sex. It symbolizes hiding something. Similarly, eyes are compared to windows, and often D-503 talks about how I-330 closes the blinds to her eyes. This proves that she is hiding something; it makes her a mystery, and therefore, the center point of the plot.
Another prominent motif is the color pink: There are pink slips, and D-503 describes O as being pink, and he talks about the pink bodies of women. From all of this, I think pink stands for intimacy. It illustrates D's feelings towards sex, intimacy, and the like. So I get the feeling that whenever he describes something as being pink, it must have some sort of intimate meaning to him.
Setting:
This novel takes place somewhere in the very distant future. It's after the Two Hundred Year War, so it's safe to assume that it's at least two hundred years after this novel was written. Maybe the twenty-second century. Unfortunately the overall setting isn't much described by the main character, except for his immediate surroundings. The city he lives in, part of The One State, is described as being beautiful because it is so uniform and perfect and mathematical. The descriptions of the uniformity of the society serves to show us how different the setting of the novel is from our society, and how they consider beauty the opposite of what we do.
Language:
The novel is written in journal style, so it's first person, and the main character is making entries. This can make things a lot more confusing, but also gives interesting insight to the character. Sometimes it is hard to understand the chronology of events, because he jumps back and forth between present and past tenses. He doesn't describe all of his terms or the phrases he uses, because to him, they are normal and shouldn't need definition. The reader is left to infer that the instructors are robots or that the "Benefactor" is the leader of their society. But because it is in first person, you get to very clearly see the changes the main character goes through and all the internal conflict that occurs because he is torn between wanting freedom and "happiness" in the One State. The language he uses to describe things is very vivid and often confusing, but perhaps that's just my translation of the book. That's something that must be taken into account; it's a translation from another language, which means the wording might not be exactly the same as the original, as we learned from the Stranger.
There are several motifs that have appeared so far, including the sky, metals, music, and the image of going "down". But the ones that stood out most to me so far are lips and windows. First, lips are used often to characterize women. Never men, I've noticed, but always women. For instance, O has round pink lips that make her seem innocent, while I-330 has blood red, sharp lips to show that she is more dangerous. The old woman at the Ancient House has no lips, because they are so wrinkled and sucked inside. Then windows have appeared very often, since it seems that all the buildings are made from glass. The act of "closing your blinds" is only done when you're going to have sex. It symbolizes hiding something. Similarly, eyes are compared to windows, and often D-503 talks about how I-330 closes the blinds to her eyes. This proves that she is hiding something; it makes her a mystery, and therefore, the center point of the plot.
Another prominent motif is the color pink: There are pink slips, and D-503 describes O as being pink, and he talks about the pink bodies of women. From all of this, I think pink stands for intimacy. It illustrates D's feelings towards sex, intimacy, and the like. So I get the feeling that whenever he describes something as being pink, it must have some sort of intimate meaning to him.
Setting:
This novel takes place somewhere in the very distant future. It's after the Two Hundred Year War, so it's safe to assume that it's at least two hundred years after this novel was written. Maybe the twenty-second century. Unfortunately the overall setting isn't much described by the main character, except for his immediate surroundings. The city he lives in, part of The One State, is described as being beautiful because it is so uniform and perfect and mathematical. The descriptions of the uniformity of the society serves to show us how different the setting of the novel is from our society, and how they consider beauty the opposite of what we do.
Language:
The novel is written in journal style, so it's first person, and the main character is making entries. This can make things a lot more confusing, but also gives interesting insight to the character. Sometimes it is hard to understand the chronology of events, because he jumps back and forth between present and past tenses. He doesn't describe all of his terms or the phrases he uses, because to him, they are normal and shouldn't need definition. The reader is left to infer that the instructors are robots or that the "Benefactor" is the leader of their society. But because it is in first person, you get to very clearly see the changes the main character goes through and all the internal conflict that occurs because he is torn between wanting freedom and "happiness" in the One State. The language he uses to describe things is very vivid and often confusing, but perhaps that's just my translation of the book. That's something that must be taken into account; it's a translation from another language, which means the wording might not be exactly the same as the original, as we learned from the Stranger.
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