A worker in the London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, where human embryos are created, she becomes the main love interest of many of the story’s characters, the two most important of which are Bernard Marx and John. Lenina Crowne serves as a relay between John’s complex thoughts and the more ‘civilized’ society of the World State. At the same time, his nave, infantile perception of the brave new world with such people in it leads to a conflict between his own values and reality, eventually causing him to kill himself in one of the story’s most touching scenes. When he confronts Mustapha Mond, the World Controller of Western Europe, it is Shakespeare that gives John a style of speaking that is capable of competing with the clever rhetoric of the controller. This interest in Shakespeare’s works provides John with the ability to verbalize his complex feelings and emotions, and gives him a framework on which to base his later criticisms of the World State values. In his isolation, John immerses himself in Shakespeare, a 900-year-old author utterly forgotten by the World State, thus further pushing ‘the savage’ away from the societal norms around him. Bernard and Lenina view this ritual as repulsive, while John expresses his frustrations at having been banned from participating, marking the cultural divide between the World State characters and ‘the savage.’ John, then, becomes the ultimate outsider, rejected by both the civilized and primitive worlds. The only character to have been raised in isolation from the World State, John’s initial entrance comes during a brutal Native American ritual, showing that he is a very primitive man in comparison with the other characters of the story. The most admirable figure of Brave New World, however, is John “The Savage,” who makes his first appearance roughly halfway through the book. Ultimately, Marx proves to be an interesting and sympathetic character, but not one that the reader can easily respect. This success, however, collapses when the savage refuses to take part in Bernard’s attempts to remain popular. After a trip to a New Mexico Indian Reservation and his subsequent discovery of John ‘the savage,’ he begins to abuse his newfound popularity and fame by taking part in all of the aspects of the World State which he had previously criticized, showing that he is a devout critic whose secret motive is to become what he criticizes – jealousy at its best.
But, ultimately, his motivations are materialistic, not idealistic – he wants for things that he cannot have. For example, just as the Director has finished discussing how the World State has eliminated ‘ovesickness,’ Bernard is shown to be himself lovesick, jealous, and angry. He suffers from a sort of inferiority complex, due to his small height – physically, he resembles a person of the lower class more than an ‘alpha.’ While Bernard is not a ‘protagonist’ in the traditional sense of the term, he proves to be a good viewpoint character, because his motivations are clearly human. By the standards of the “Brave New World,” Marx is a dysfunctional person, his conditioning having obvious flaws. In this context, the people who inhabit Brave New World jump off of the page, each offering his or her own testimony to the inherent bizarreness of the scientifically crafted lifestyles of this brave new world.īernard Marx is perhaps the most compelling character throughout the first part of the book, his last name ironically being that of the founder of Communism. In many ways, Brave New World is almost a story of survival – not survival as opposed to the natural world, but survival of the human race, of individuals trying to live in a world where the individual spirit is considered nonexistent. Against this harsh setting, Huxley experiments with various ideas and philosophies, using an eclectic cast of characters to move his ideas from the printed page to the reader by placing them in a human, or semi-human, context. It is a story of a dystopia, of a cold scientific world order and the people who inhabit it. Brave New World, by acclaimed author Aldous Huxley, is not so much a novel about individuals as it is about a society as a whole.
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