Abstract

Starting from the essay Inside the Whale, in which Orwell examines the general attitude of the novelists of his generation, this paper aims to explore the «inside the whale» perspective in Huxley's production. In his Max and the White Phagocytes, Miller wrote that the idea of living in the belly of a whale was repulsive to Huxley; however, this judgment is not entirely in agreement with Huxley's artistic outcomes. The main characters of Brave New World and Island seem to act precisely «inside the whale», and the different solutions they find to accept or to fight this condition can be read as a kaleidoscopic approach of their author to this issue. Through the failures of their attempts, the reader understands the risks of the «inside the whale» attitude, as Miller intends it; those failures notwithstanding, in his works Huxley puts forward his own interpretation of this perspective, offering the starting point for his utopic project of a minimal ethics.