This paper attempts to theorize two twentieth-century fictional dystopias, Brave New World (2013) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), using Plato’s political dialogues. It explores not only how these three authors’ utopian/dystopian visions compare as types of narrative, but also how possible, desirable, and useful their imagined societies may be, and for whom. By examining where the Republic, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four stand on such issues as social engineering, censorship, cultural and sexual politics, the paper allows them to inform and critique each other, hoping to reveal in the process what may or may not have changed in utopian thinking since Plato wrote his seminal work. It appears that the social import of speculative fiction is ambivalent, for not only may it lend itself to totalitarian appropriation and application—as seems to have been the case with The Republic—but it may also constitute a means of critiquing the existing status quo by conceptualizing different ways of thinking and being, thereby allowing for the possibility of change.

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The present paper begins by arguing that, unlike the omnipresent phrase "one of us" in Lord Jim which has two easily identifi able primary sources, namely Genesis 3:22 and Poetics II, the source of the related poetic leitmotif which imagines grief or shame as a clouded sky is multiple and protean. What Conrad called "the common expressions, 'under a cloud'" (LJ 259) is shown to have travelled through such grand narratives as Homer's Iliad (750-700 BC), Sophocles' Antigone (442-441 BC), and Euripides' Hippolytus (428 BC), before gracing the pages of Lord Jim. In the shame culture of epic, the clouded-sky motif is identifi ed as signaling the warrior's rising ire through the pathetic fallacy. In tragedy, on the other hand, the same motif in conjunction with the convention of the theatrical mask is said to signify the opaqueness and inaccessibility of the human psyche which necessitates the construction of identity while facilitating the production of scapegoats. However, in keeping with the anti-Gnostic pessimism that Conrad shares with the Greek tragedians, Lord Jim presents the ontological and moral fog surrounding the protagonist as a blessing in disguise since, as Oedipus' fate illustrates, there may be more danger fi nally in being understood than in being misunderstood. Thus, given that Jim is "one of us", his clouded countenance-akin to a mask shielding an actor's face from himself as much as from the audience-is presented by the novel as humanity's last line of defense against tragic knowledge.