Alessandra Glogowsky
Why does John reject the ‘civilization’ represented in “Brave New World” and how does Huxley make this apparent in his writing?
John comes from an Indian reservation in New Mexico, and goes to the Brave New world with Bernard Marx who was about to be sent away from there because he was different. Bernard and Lenina brought John because they knew that John was the son of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning with Linda. This would humiliate the Directory because having viviparous babies in the Brave New World was seen as disgusting, and no one would ever imagine that the director could have had one himself. John was not accepted in the savage reservation because his mother slept with many men, this was seen as an absurd, but in the Brave New World it was not, “Every one belongs to everyone else”; having sex with many different people was a moral duty.
John was fascinated by the prospect of going to the Brave New World because his mother told him that in the Brave New World people never had problems, because even if they had they would take a drug called Soma, which would make them “take a holiday from reality” and forget all about them. He was also told about how people travelled by helicopter and he thought that they could really fly. He learned how to read and right superficially, how everything is clean and that no one marries, that there are no nasty smells, that there were boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at the other side of the world and that babies were born in lovely clean bottles… He thought that “ The Other Place ” was a perfect world, “The happiest times were when she told him about the Other Place”, such as in Shakespeare’s stories, which he had read and loved.
