In the final chapters John seeks isolation, and goes out into an abandoned part of the new world. In seeking to cleanse himself of his sins he purges and whips himself. People walking by see him doing theses strange things, and the next day tons of helicopters come to watch this weird phenomena of the "savage" whipping himself. John gets mad and starts whipping them, and Lenina shows up and he starts hurting her as well. The people watching on, are bewildered and start hitting each other because they are as children and mime the action of a higher intellectual. The police show up and gas everyone with soma, and they all have an orgy. When John wakes up and realizes that he participated in the orgy as well, he is so disgusted with himself that he hangs himself. The thing I disliked most about this book was that there wasn't a hero, I wanted John to stand up for justice, and equality, and freedom and fight to make the system better. Instead he takes the easy way out and kills himself, leaving the people entrapped in the prison of their own minds unable to even think for themselves.
In chapter fourteen John gets the news that his biological mother is dying from an overdose of soma. John rushes to the senility ward to hopefully catch her before she passes away, upon finding her, she is in a pleasant stupor from the soma. John sits beside her and tries to talk to her, but after she doesn't respond he realizes it's useless and starts instead reminiscing about the good memories of Linda. He is violently disrupted from his nostalgic moment by some young children who are being death conditioned. He rudely pushes them away, and tells him to leave them alone. But after the disruption when he tries to think of pleasant thoughts of his mother again all he can think about are the bad memories of her from his childhood. He then sees that Linda is dreaming about Popé and it makes him very morose and angry, he tries to shake her and wake her up to remember him, but instead she ends up dying in his arms. When John is crying by his mother's bed after she dies, the nurse almost seems sympathetic towards his pain; she clearly doesn't understand what he's going through but she seams genuinely sorry. Which is something we haven't really seen in the people in the new world state. So maybe there is hope for a not so Brave New World.
In Chapter thirteen John goes to open the door for Helmholtz and finds Lenina there instead. Lenina, after taking half a gramme of soma, and persuaded by Fanny comes to John's apartment to take things into her own hands. Lenina strips down and tries to force herself onto John, who is shocked and disgusted by her actions and pushes her away and calls her a slut. In the entire book up to this point John has always been completely infatuated with Lenina, now it is as if a spell has been broken and he sees her for who she really is. He is ashamed of her, and of himself, for having thought she was ever good or pure. Also because of John's upbringing, and his Mother always sleeping around with other men, and boys calling her rude names, he knew that that was a bad thing; and now that he sees Lenina doing the same thing he is deeply angry and saddened. I think this is when John first started becoming depressed, and feeling hopeless for the people of the New World. Because this woman that he has idolized as a goddess, is merely another average slutty girl in the New World.
In chapter eleven Bernard is now famous because of Linda, and her and Thomas's accidental child, the "savage". Bernard now has everything he always wanted; respect, woman, and money. Because he now is the same or better, than all of his equals, the Alpha pluses, he is more than happy to slide into normalcy and conformity. Before he would never take soma, but now it's just another part of his life, now he brags about how many woman he has slept with and how famous he is. Watson Helmholtz's is thoroughly disgusted with Bernard and who he has become. As readers, I think we all were too, but really how different are we from him? If we had been outcast and looked down upon all of our lives, and then all of a sudden we were given everything we ever wanted, would we not do the same and become what society wanted us to become?
In chapter ten Bernard brings John and Linda back with him to the New World. The Director tells Bernard to meet him and Henry Foster in the Fertilizing Room, because lots of higher caste employees work there and he plans to make a public example or Bernard. After the Director makes a public example and embarrasses him, he asks if Bernard has anything to say for himself, which Bernard replies by bringing out Linda and John. The Director is left shocked, disgusted, and speechless. What stood out to me the most in this chapter was that Linda still loved Thomas, the Director. Even though they got separated on the reservation, and he didn't come back looking for her, she still loves him. In this society that promotes having multiple partners, and discourages just being with one person, there is this love, this hope, that persevered through all of her awful times on the savage reservation, denying and breaking apart the very social fabric that they have worked so hard to make stable and impenetrable.
In Chapter nine Bernard and Lenina head back to the cabin after visiting with the "savages". Lenina takes an eighteen hour soma vacation from reality, and while she is sleeping Bernard takes a trip back to the world state to get licenses to bring Linda and John back with him. Meanwhile, John comes to the cabin as directed by Bernard, and finding it locked brakes in through the window. After looking through the cabin at Lenina's things, he comes upon her peacefully sleeping and briefly contemplates doing immoral things to her as she is in her soma coma. I find this particular act and his mental process ironic, because he is disgusted and appalled with himself that he would even think such disgraceful and impure thoughts towards her. But in her society it wouldn't be wrong to think things like that, or to do them. For "Everyone belongs to everyone else" so he would be completely normal to do that, but in his culture and religion that would be an extreme violation to her sacred purity.
In chapter eight we learn about John’s upbringing on the “Savage Reservation” in New Mexico. He had a complicated, painful, and restricted childhood but managed to make the most of it regardless. He is hated by both the native people and even by his biological mother, who makes him call her by her first name, Linda, and never “Mother”. Linda is physically and verbally abusive to him, repeatedly hitting him and telling him that if he was never born she wouldn’t be stuck on the reservation away from all of the pleasures of the New World. Although Linda is drunk and sleeping with Popé for most of John’s childhood, she does teach him how to read, maybe the only positive thing that she gave him in his life. As William Nicholson said “We read to know that we are not alone”, so John who feels very isolated is suddenly opened up to a whole new world when his mother gave him a book of Shakespeare’s works. The native people exclude him and resent him because he is an outsider and because his mother had sexual relations with married men in the tribe. I find it particularly interesting when he talks about when he was alone, left to his wandering, vast mind, he discovered Time, Death, and God; three things that people in the New World never have the freedom to discover, for they are continuously in the stupor of momentary pleasure never allowed to contemplate deeper or darker things.
In Chapter Seven Bernard and Lenina visit the Savage Reservation in New Mexico. The main thing that stood out to me in this chapter was Lenina's extreme ethnocentrism, or prejudged viewpoints of other cultures from her own blind love of her society. She was disgusted when she saw women nursing their babies, parents together, or even ageing people because she has been conditioned from infancy that these behaviors are dirty, abnormal, and wrong. I find this interesting because as a reader I have my own ethnocentric beliefs, as do most people reading this book, for I find it appalling and sick that "everyone belongs to everyone" and children are having sex together; but in their society this is "normal". I think the author is trying to make the readers think about their own beliefs and customs before they judge others. For in our day and age it is normal for a child to have two parents, or to see elderly people on the streets, but to her that is the same as us reading about adolescents having sex or the government conditioning embryos. This society that is supposed to be bigger, better, and more improved than the past one; is instead less evolved and more primal in nature and in their desires. |