![]() So far, Bernard has experimented with passion by avoiding soma and nursing his anger, but in this chapter, he learns about actual, unavoidable strong feelings - first at a distance, then very personally. All the conventions of this society - soma consumption, regular recreational sex - are designed to prevent strong feelings like rage and prolonged sexual desire from building up in emotional power. Since passion is dangerous to social stability, the very thought of feeling intensely constitutes blasphemy, as the shocked Lenina points out. ![]() ![]() Up to now, Bernard has expressed his longing to feel something - anything - strongly. The chapter further clarifies Bernard's very shallow attempts to be an individual and makes clear that he lacks the moral courage to suffer for freedom. In Chapter 6, Huxley reveals Bernard's pained recognition of the consequences of his anti-social feelings and actions. Appalled by the news, Bernard's "theoretical courage" evaporates, and Lenina persuades him to take soma to calm himself before they fly off to the Savage Reservation. When Bernard calls Helmholtz about the tap, Watson gives him some bad news: the D.H.C. As the Warden leers at Lenina and describes the Reservation - there's no escape, and human birth remains a reality - Bernard suddenly remembers that he left the eau de cologne tap running at home. In the third section, Bernard and Lenina fly to Sante Fe, where they meet with the Warden of the Reservation. But this threat has a tonic effect on Bernard, who later boasts about it to his friend Helmholtz, who likes Bernard but hates his boasting and self-pity. shifts attention by expressing his disappointment in Bernard's odd behavior outside work and threatens to exile him to Iceland. tells Bernard about the young woman he took on his trip and how she disappeared mysteriously during their stay on the Reservation.Įmbarrassed by his emotional reverie, the D.H.C. In the middle section of the chapter, Bernard submits his travel permit to the D.H.C., who remembers his own holiday many years earlier to the Savage Reservation. Bernard wants an adult - and emotional - relationship with Lenina, not just the mindless sex that consummates their first date. In a flashback to their first date, Lenina and Bernard quarrel when he hovers their helicopter over the English Channel so that they can observe the power of Nature. The next day, he hangs himself in shame.As this chapter opens, Lenina worries about Bernard's eccentric desire for privacy and his tendency to question basic social assumptions. When the World State media and curious spectators start flocking to the lighthouse, including Lenina, he ends up sparking a massive orgy. Accordingly, he soon moves into a remote lighthouse, where he can be alone and self-sufficient, practicing austerities like whipping himself if he becomes too cheerful or daydreams of Lenina. When he’s arrested, he debates Mustapha Mond at length about the importance of truth versus happiness and stability, arguing that he’d rather be unhappy and free than living under World State slavery. He is attracted to Lenina, but he is repulsed by the promiscuous sexuality she’s been conditioned to practice, and he turns on her when she tries to seduce him, repeatedly hurling the Shakespearean insult “strumpet.” After Linda dies from soma abuse, John stages a brief rebellion in the hospital vestibule. ![]() John is eager to see the World State, since his mother describes it as a paradise, but once there, he thinks that World State culture is immoral, infantilizing, and degrading to humanity. He spends the first 20 years of his life on the Reservation, and though the Reservation natives treat him as an outsider, he still picks up their religious and moral values (like the importance of self-denial and a belief in monogamous marriage), and develops a love of Shakespeare, whom he quotes frequently. John is born to a woman from the World State, Linda, who gets stranded in a Savage Reservation in New Mexico. ![]()
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