Antic Hay

"Antic Hay" by Aldous Huxley is a story set in the early 1900s, about Theodore Gumbril Junior, a teacher who is not happy with his life and has big thoughts about the world. He doesn't like the rules of society and wants to find something better for himself. As Theodore thinks about life, school, and what he wants to achieve, the story pokes fun at the way people lived back then. We meet Theodore in a church, listening to a preacher, but he is really thinking about his own boring life as a schoolteacher and his feelings about God. He feels stuck and wants to find something more exciting. After the church scene, we find out that he wants to invent inflatable pants, called "Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes", showing that he dreams of leaving his boring job and life behind to create something new.