P144 “What should have been the crowning moment of Bernard’s whole career had turned out to be the moment of his greatest humiliation.”
He had tried to elevate himself, to become accepted in a society that shunned him, by using the savage, but it had backfired and therefore the reader can sympathise. Not only had he lost the respect of his peers and fellow Alphas, but also he had lost the respect of someone who was, in many ways, so similar to him.
Bernard can be pitied immensely for his ability to sense, see and appreciate things of beauty and as he could value and enjoy his surroundings he can be pitied. These lines show his appreciation of his surroundings,
P50 “He looked up into the sky and round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina’s face.
‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ His voice trembled a little.’
He feels for things, and, like John, because of his ability to sense good emotion he can be hurt more. The next lines show Bernard’s dismay and hurt when all Lenina could say about the beauty around her was a hypnopaedic sentence – that it would be good for obstacle golf.
P50 “His face was an expression of pain.”
The greatest amount of sympathy the reader can feel for Bernard would be because of his sincere love of Lenina. That love was one of the main reasons he stood out from society and distanced himself from others because of her. He felt deeply angered when other men spoke of Lenina like they would other women, which is known in these lines,
P36 “ ‘Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.’ Bernard ground his teeth. ‘Have her here, have her there. Like mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton.”
Bernard can be sympathised with enormously, almost more than before because he felt more hurt that she did not think of herself as better than that, which is known in these lines,
P44 “And what makes it worse, she thinks of herself as meat.”
John, the savage, due to his upbringing and knowledge of love and love’s values was perhaps more mentally damaged because of his sincere adoration of Lenina. Both himself and Bernard had grown to learn what the love of just one person felt like and therefore they can both be pitied a great deal for it. This could be blamed on the treatment by others in their society or such treatment could be a result of this. Their loneliness is made apparent to each other in these lines,
P113 “ ‘Alone, always alone,’ the young man was saying. The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard’s mind. Alone, alone… ‘So am I,’ he said, on a gush of confidence. ‘Terribly alone.’
John’s immense love of Lenina is made clear when he quotes Romeo and Juliet in these lines,
P145 “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear…”
Yet, John’s passionate words have no affect on Lenina because at the time he says them she was with the Arch Songster. John can be pitied a great deal for his deep feelings for someone who can never reciprocate them.
John was never accepted into the Society of the Savage Reservation due to his mother, Linda, and her seemingly ‘strange’ ways. Her values were unusual in the Savage society because her morals were hypnopaedic and so she in turn isolated herself, and John, from that society. The New World society had therefore affected him, as it did everything, indirectly. Linda’s promiscuous ways angered many in the Savage society, which made John an outcast, and therefore he did not fit in. Their hatred of him and his mother is clear in these lines,
P103 “While he was lying on the ground she hit him three times with the whip. It hurt more than anything he had ever felt – like fire. The whip whistled again, fell. But this time it was Linda who screamed.”
John was only a little boy at the time, he cannot of understood what was happening and so it must have been very mentally scarring for him. The torment that he and his mother were subject to did not end until they left the reservation and John can be deeply sympathised with for all he went through.
John believed that the new world would be an amazing society, full of good and so he was anguished when he saw that this society was emotionless and somewhat cruel. His values of love, compassion, integrity and honesty meant that the new world to him was completely inhuman and therefore he was isolated in this world also. His moral and physical differences made him an attraction, he was harassed and merely used as entertainment. What he felt about his torment is shown in these lines,
P204 “Three days later, like turkey buzzards settling on a corpse, the reporters came.”
The anguish he felt in this society made him feel so morally worthless he learned to hate everything that reminded of him of ‘civilized’ society, which is known in these lines,
P200 “The building was of ferro-concrete and in excellent condition – almost too comfortable, the savage had thought when he first explored the place, almost too civilizedly luxurious.
John’s new found mental instability can be greatly pitied by the reader.
John’s heartache is seemingly never-ending as he also has to cope with the death of his mother. Death, to him, is most tragic, due to his moral values he has been brought up to grieve, yet the new world considered the loss of his mother to be insignificant, and no great tragedy. His grief when his mother dies and the nurse’s surprise and outrage at the sight of John is known in these lines,
P169 “then fell on his knees, beside the bed, and covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably. The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (scandalous exhibition!)”
John’s natural grief was seen as a scandal and he was even told off because of it. He can be sympathised with enormously for all that he has to withstand and the apparent inhumanity he was subject to.
The greatest amount of sympathy that is felt for John by the reader would be because of his sincere love for Lenina and it was that love for her that eventually destroyed him. A while before John tragically ended his own life he had been attacking himself physically and mentally. He felt that he had sinned by being amongst a society that was so blasphemous. Due to his mental sensitivity, which had built up all throughout the hardships he had endured in his life, the punishments he brought upon himself were extreme. His determination for self-purification is known in these lines,
P200 “He pacified his conscience by promising himself a compensatingly harder self-discipline purifications the more complete and thorough.”
Amongst other things, he felt an intense guilt about the death of his mother, he blamed himself and that was another reason for his self-punishment. His shocking self-mutilation is described in these lines,
P203 “Stripped to the waist and hitting himself with a whip of knotted cords. His back was horizontally streaked with crimson, and from weal to weal ran thick trickles of blood.”
The whippings he had received in the Savage Reservation had obviously affected him because, eerily he was imitating the past by whipping himself as a punishment.
The world that John was so passionately angry with eventually bettered him. As John began to whip Lenina and then himself, soma was sprayed into the crowds – typical of the new world, the energy had been turned into sexual energy. John was out of control and he was so “stupefied by soma” he could not take responsibility for his actions. He then committed what he felt to be the ultimate moral sin, which is made known in these lines,
P212 “He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension at the light; then suddenly remembered – everything.”
He had slept with Lenina and because of his morals he felt there was no way he could purify himself and repent his sins and so he felt he had to take his own life. John can be immensely sympathised with by the reader because he was a very disturbed and tortured man, through no fault of his own.
In conclusion, I pity both of these unfortunate men equally and feel a great deal of sympathy for them because both their lives ended miserably. They both isolated themselves due to the ways that made them so unique and different, which I have outlined. That isolation and the sincere passions they felt within them in turn led them to their untimely ends. John in his heart-felt suicide and Bernard in his exile, both of them away from everyone that meant anything to them.
