The narrative begins in the heart of the new society, the Central London Hatchery, where test-tube babies are chemically
and genetically engineered for their futures, decanted, and then carefully conditioned by hypnopaedia to be good consumers: healthy, adjusted, content with their
social place, and unquestioningly "happy." Theirs is a hierarchical, pyramidal society, with a broad base of lower-caste, antlike identical twins (Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons) and a small elite of Alphas and Betas, who do the little thinking necessary to keep their world functioning. Initially it seems a wholly stable scientific society, in which Sigmund Freud has eliminated guilt and produced sexual liberation, Henry Ford has contributed mass production, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have articulated an inescapable social destiny of "Community, Identity, and Stability."
Then the smooth image cracks. First, the historical flashbacks by Mustapha Mond, who dismisses history as "bunk," oppose large sections of the rejected past and the idealized present, then gradually shorten the contrasting sections, until, ironically, they merge in a high-speed swirl of voices that calls into question the basic tenets of "progress." So too does Aldous Huxley’s individualizing of characters socially determined to be identical. Bernard Marx is dissatisfied with the utopia and would like to be alone in nature, think deep thoughts, have one lover, and spend quality time conversing deeply; Lenina breaks with her conditioning by wanting only one man; and even Helmholtz Watson longs for some greater artistic depth to his creations: simpleminded motion-picture "feelies" and articles on "community sings."
When Bernard and Lenina visit a Native American reservation (Malpais Badlands), past and present meet, with the Indians living reminders of disease, superstition, guilt, racial prejudice, possessiveness, death, and individuality. Bernard, a Wordsworthian-type romantic who initially seems the antihero, is supplanted by the Savage—the new protagonist, a youth without a social place, an eccentric, a thinker. Threatened with exile, Bernard transports Linda and her son (the offspring of the Director of Hatcheries) to London for a confrontation he hopes will save him. The Savage meets the utopia of his dreams and finds it wanting, a dystopia against which he violently reacts. He finds the escape into drugs and mindless sensual experience disturbing, the Bokanovsky twins and the death conditioning repulsive, and the substitution of sex for
romance despicable. He finds this world of progress too easy and, in a debate with the World Controller after the death of his "soma"-drugged mother, demands the right to be unhappy. In the dramatic dialogue between the World Controller and the Savage, the past seems to be defeated, for the Controller is the voice of reason and the Savage the voice of passion, deeply felt but not convincing. Nevertheless, the highly questionable nature of this stabilized society has been exposed.
Helmholtz Watson finds happiness in exile to an island colony of social misfits and helps Bernard Marx adjust to that same exile. Lenina tries to return to her old life, without success, and the World Controller forces the Savage to stay as a human guinea pig to be studied and analyzed. When the Savage seeks to create his own pure, ascetic reservation in a lighthouse, he finds escape impossible. Tormented by sightseers, fascinated and repelled by the sexual license around him, he beats his own flesh to purge himself and, in a frenzy at the appearance of Lenina, beats her and then has sex with her. Having finally yielded to the sexual temptations of a world he has tried hard to reject, the Savage commits suicide—a Hamlet-like figure, betrayed by mother and girlfriend, beset by illusion, and unable to grasp reality.