Best remembered today for Brave New World, his dystopian vision of a biologically engineered future, and for his experiments with psychedelic drugs (The Doors of Perception), Huxley was known in the 1920s and 1930s as the author of erudite and mordantly witty satires of contemporary life. Eyeless in Gaza is a novel that charts the career of its central character, Anthony Beavis, from his childhood and adolescence through his experiences as a member of the intellectual elite of inter-war London to a journey to Mexico which opens his eyes to the real values of life. Huxley himself wrote that the novel is about 'what happens to someone who becomes really very free' and that it records 'the rather awful vacuum that such freedom turns out to be'. Beavis is a man who appears to be liberated. He is comfortably off and therefore freed from the fear of poverty and the inconvenience of uncongenial work. He is intellectually gifted and able to free himself from the chains of conventional thinking. His sexual life is one of cool promiscuity, freed from commitment and the constraints of commonplace morality. Yet, beneath the surface, he is emotionally scarred by the death of his mother when he was a child and by the suicide of his closest friend for which he considers himself partly responsible. Apparently the luckiest of men, he has lost any sense of purpose in his own life and meaning in the wider universe. 'Simply to be shaken out of negativity', he decides to accompany a Communist friend to Mexico to join the revolution in that country and there, despite the disasters that overtake the two men, he finds his life is changed. Samson in Milton's poem Samson Agonistes, from which Huxley takes his title, is physically blind. Beavis is metaphorically blind and Huxley's narrative, moving backwards and forwards in time, reveals the process by which he gains his sight.

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