Brave New World Essay Essay

Brave New World Essay
Sometimes seemingly similar people turn out to be vastly different.   In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley compares and contrasts various characters.   Although raised in vastly different societies, John the Savage and Bernard Marx represent very similar things.   As the novel progresses, the differences that make them stand out become more clear.   In Brave New World, John the Savage and Bernard Marx both connect and separate through the common themes of reality, knowledge, and isolation.
To Bernard Marx and John the Savage, reality should be a world without ‘soma’ and conditioning; without ‘feelies’ and endless promiscuity.   Throughout his life, Bernard Marx has a painful awareness of reality and feels the impact of difference in a conformist society.   For his Alpha plus status, Marx’s physical appearance is slightly stunted.   Many members of the dystopian society joke of “alcohol [mistakenly placed] into his blood-surrogate” as an embryo (46).   The fully grown Marx learns to prefer this bitter reality, rarely taking ‘soma.’ In contrast, John the Savage does not understand reality until he is in civilization.   He lives most of his life on the reservation, and his mother teaches him everything he knows.   Before he experiences civilization, he knows nothing of conditioning, unlike Marx, and is not conditioned himself.   For him, reality is isolation from other ‘savages’ in the reservation.   However, once he arrives at civilization, John the Savage begins to despise the conforming customs and traditions.   Once again setting himself apart from Marx, John attempts to “bring freedom” to Delta workers.   His actions are pointless, of course, because the Delta workers were too conditioned to be saved.   John the Savage’s attempt to help others sets him further apart from Marx, who only wants to help himself and improve his own life.   In the end, John, by “claiming the right to be unhappy,” truly picks and prefers reality over fantasy, not Marx...