Growth as a Reader

As my tumulus high school life comes to end, it is inevitable for me to consider how much I have improved from burning four years of my life to get to a good university. However, as a prospective English Major, it is important to consider how much I have grown as a reader as much as I have as a writer. If writing is the process of harvesting the fruits of one’s labor, reading could be considered as everything else, from sowing the seeds of ideas to watering one’s knowledge. Without reading, one could never learn how to think and unsurprisingly write better. Therefore, it wouldn’t be a surprise that I was able to further cultivate my understanding and ideology through the wide reading which AP Literature opened doors to. 

Perhaps the most important part of my growth as a reader was to learn to consider a writers’ goals , dilemmas, and how they tried to resolve it through their writing. I had learnt to do this mostly during my independent author’s project as I read through various works written by Aldous Huxley. While not exactly obvious from reading Brave New World, going through and analyzing Brave New World Revisited and Island, then learning about his biography revealed Huxley’s inner plights regarding the future and the prospects of enlightenment. Reading the three novels from this perspective significantly changed the underlying contents of the three novels. Initially, I believed that the three novels signified Huxley’s hopeless struggles in finding an answer to the dark, unavoidable future in which a world without privacy and freedom was inevitable, and any genuine attempt at utopia could only end up in miserable failure. With Huxley’s inner dilemmas in mind, I was able to witness a much brighter interpretation unfold in front of me. The three novels were not separate warnings of a depraved future, but instead Huxley’s journey of trying to find a method of enlightenment. Brave New World and its Revisited counterpart served to observe the dark future that was determined by the usage of technology and destruction of human values of pain, restraint and intelligence. His final novel Island was the fruition of Huxley’s life long goals of finding a possible path for human enlightenment. Even if he solemnly came to agree that it may be impossible for a civilization in its entirety to fully espouse the idea of a refined human being, Aldous was able to fully demonstrate that it was possible to reach enlightenment on a personal level, if not anything else. By writing Island, Aldous Huxley was able to demonstrate that it wasn’t the successful creation of an utopia that mattered; simply trying to create one was of merit on its own. 

The new tools of considering the author himself as an important character of his literary works opened new doors for me as a reader, teaching me to look at works in a much broader sense than just the work itself. It is my hope that the drastic growth I had as a reader for both this and last semester could serve to aid me in my college year.