“ ‘All right, then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer (…) ‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.”
The reader feels deeply identified with John in this passage, mainly because of his rebellious and courageous tone, whereas Mustapha Mond represents domination and lack of freedom; Huxley uses the common device of the conflict between seemingly oppressed individuals and the organized, cold and analytical oppressor, usually an institution, in a subjective manner, thereby touching the inner fibres of human idealism for freedom and making the reader be in the part of the Savage. In this level the Savage should be the most familiar and realist character of them all, and is probably the level at which Huxley worked more in his development of the message, yet an implausibility in the situation is found in an underlying plane: the philosophical training of the Savage.
It is hardly believable that a person that has only read Shakespeare in his life and has had no real education in order to understand literature’s intentions as such and therefore the matters of human nature, consciousness, life, etc., can hold such an elevated discussion, and finally, in the eyes of the reader as portrayed by Huxley, win the argument, with a man as thoroughly educated as Mustapha Mond. Given the many other incongruencies and small mistakes found in the novel (which have been recognised by Huxley himself) it seems that this implausibility was not deliberately planned in order to convey some message, but was an inevitable result of the author’s method of exposing the central argument. It may be however that this is a device used to transmit an opinion about human nature and its inherent spiritual tendencies to romantic values and actual morals (as these cannot be genetic or even so mental due to the genetic engineering and the conditioning suffered by the Alphas themselves which are those who show the relative desire for these). Even though the Savage has lacked the sufficient instruction to uphold such a discussion, “human sprit”, which is in every case expressed through the mind, (this would be why castes lower than Alphas cannot express this spirit) tells him certain things that are right and wrong which are subsequently the themes of discussion with Mustapha Mond. However this interpretation seems somewhat to forced and does not connect completely well with Huxley’s pessimistic view of the future evident in the ending, as the concept of the inherent quality for freedom in human spirit has something of an optimistic connotation.
In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Alekos is a character who is extremely isolated from civilization, both physically and mentally, as his way of thinking, innocent and almost childish, contrasts deeply with that of most of the central people of the novel, military members which are obviously connected to the war, and the whole situation itself. Alekos’ world of fireworks and diversion is not other than the crude and brutal world at war, factor constantly present in the reader’s thoughts, mainly due to De Berniéries gory descriptions of the its horrors: “The pieces of skull looked grey and were coated in membrane and thick blood. Some of the fluid was bright red, and some of it was crimson. He was still alive”.
Alekos acts as the author’s main tool to express the pointlessness and stupidness of war and conflict altogether by contrasting his almost wise naivety and innocence with the corruption and evil of the act of war itself. We have stated the his characteristics exhibit an element of wisdom because he seems to always have a simple yet interesting panoramic perspective of the events, so for example, when there is a raging battle in the island below, Alekos thinks of the explosions as exciting fireworks: surely a naïve position, but one that lowers the significance of human conflict immensely making it seem ridiculous, like children playing with toy rockets, leading the reader to rethink the true importance of one’s actions overall, this effect of this and wise innocence is reinforced by Alekos’ age: at the beginning of the novel we are told that he is approximately sixty years old and as the years pass he seems equally strong:
“Alekos was a man who at sixty would be the same as he had been at twenty, thin and strong, a prodigy of slow endurance, as incapable of mercurial flight as any of his goats”.
This element of omniscience and elevation (connected with divinity) is also apparent from his living location: high up Mt. Aenos where he can observe from an exteriorised perspective everything that happens on the island below and also from the fact that in Chapter I Dr. Iannis’ writings refer to a temple to god Zeus, the god of gods, in the summit of Mt. Aenos, giving Alekos’ character a clear divine connotation.
The implausibility of Alekos is in this case much more deliberate and subtle, as an element of magical realism, this is to say, camouflaged by the narrative style and reactions of the characters among other devices, (feature proper of that literary technique) than in Brave New World. In this case the character is defined by this implausibility, instead of this last one being a residual product of the former. There is a clear purpose to symbolically represent the human value of well-led wisdom, a particularly significant one in context with the setting in which most of human knowledge is used to develop military tactics and weapons to destroy each other, therefore the aim of depicting war as senseless and idiotic is successfully accomplished at least in the sphere of influence Alekos within the storyline.
In conclusion, the seemingly unrealistic or implausible characters in the context of each novel do play a crucial role in the development of the ideas the author wants to portray. In the first case, the Savage acts as the ambassador of our proper human passions in the Brave New World so that Huxley’s point of view on the conflict presented, the trading of freedom and high art for ignorant bliss, is conveyed properly, using the necessary narrative subjective ness. However small carelessness’s in the plot create an involuntary implausibility in this character making it not at all convincing in the underlying levels, yet no less effective in the conceptual clash and further debate, which is the whole point of the novel. In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin a much different technique is employed by De Berniéres as we have observed, making of Alekos equally effective in transmitting the authors ideas as John, but doing so in a more artful and thought up way than Huxley through a subtle symbolic representation of the human values behind the author’s call to innocence and modesty as the ultimate form of wisdom.