You could see it as a portrait of a man who’s stuck at simulacra level 3 (in the masking the lack of reality sense, not so much the signaling sense, though you can also watch him deciding which signals to send and which he’s just going to ignore even though he knows he should send them). He not only lacks the epistemic tools to see reality except in glimpses before retreating to his fortress of banality, but is scared of reality and so doesn’t want to, despite his near-constant boredom and misery. And so he dies in confusion, a banal, narcissistic void in the center of the story.
(Although if you consider that this was published in 1921, i.e. just a little after WWI, you may consider that the main character may have participated in WWI and have a little more sympathy for him. Or maybe not.)
I don’t think the existence of multiple movies is good evidence that what appeals about the story as a written story is not at least partially the writing style. Yes, it is impossible to film the story as written. Moviemakers may rise to the challenge of creating something with the same feel and basic plot, and take the existence of previous versions as evidence that it’s a project that’s worth doing and also that it hasn’t been done right yet, so there’s still room for their version. (Though apparently Huxley did one of the adaptations to film, so presumably he got it right if there is a right. Still, updating classics is always popular.)
I do think this was probably a more successful story at the time it was written, and now it’s more classic. To some degree, I think the story depends on the gender roles and expectations of the time (1921), which can to some extent be derived from the text, but maybe not completely, and probably it was more meaningful when this was something the reader would be living with directly. The Sleepwalkers is describing the period just before WWI, and WWI had an effect (shell shock, society trying to deal with the reality of shell shock), but:
Historians of gender have suggested that around the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, a relatively expansive form of patriarchal identity centered on the satisfaction of the appetites (food, sex, commodities) made way for something slimmer, harder and more abstinent. … Yet these increasingly hypertrophic forms of masculinity existed in tension with ideals of obedience, courtesy, cultural refinement and charity that were still view as markers of the ‘gentleman’. Perhaps we can ascribe the signs of role strain and exhaustion we observe … to an accentuation of gender roles that had begun to impose intolerable burdens on some men. … The nervousness that many saw as the signature of this era manifested itself in triumph over the ‘weakness’ of one’s own will
You could see it as a portrait of a man who’s stuck at simulacra level 3 (in the masking the lack of reality sense, not so much the signaling sense, though you can also watch him deciding which signals to send and which he’s just going to ignore even though he knows he should send them). He not only lacks the epistemic tools to see reality except in glimpses before retreating to his fortress of banality, but is scared of reality and so doesn’t want to, despite his near-constant boredom and misery. And so he dies in confusion, a banal, narcissistic void in the center of the story.
(Although if you consider that this was published in 1921, i.e. just a little after WWI, you may consider that the main character may have participated in WWI and have a little more sympathy for him. Or maybe not.)
I don’t think the existence of multiple movies is good evidence that what appeals about the story as a written story is not at least partially the writing style. Yes, it is impossible to film the story as written. Moviemakers may rise to the challenge of creating something with the same feel and basic plot, and take the existence of previous versions as evidence that it’s a project that’s worth doing and also that it hasn’t been done right yet, so there’s still room for their version. (Though apparently Huxley did one of the adaptations to film, so presumably he got it right if there is a right. Still, updating classics is always popular.)
I do think this was probably a more successful story at the time it was written, and now it’s more classic. To some degree, I think the story depends on the gender roles and expectations of the time (1921), which can to some extent be derived from the text, but maybe not completely, and probably it was more meaningful when this was something the reader would be living with directly. The Sleepwalkers is describing the period just before WWI, and WWI had an effect (shell shock, society trying to deal with the reality of shell shock), but: