John Brave New World Analysis

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Pages: 3

Popular communitarian writer Robert Nozick once said, “ Our ability to make choices makes us valuable, because our choices cannot be divorced from our community, thus we must respect people as capable of choice.” In Brave New World by Aldus Huxley, John comes to the realization that he cannot separate himself from society, which illuminates Huxley’s message that utopian societies are not communities, but machines. While alienated, John learns to reconcile and scrutinize the two worlds he sprawls, but ultimately the burdens he carries illuminates his true feelings towards the world he was raised in, and the world he now inhabits.

John is socially exiled in both societies he lives in, because of his aloof status in both worlds, he is
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He is still plagued by the expectations of Malpais while trying to be the perfect Fordian interchangeable part in civilized society. He flees to the lighthouse because he feels tainted by society. He believes “it poisoned me, I was defiled.” (page 254) For a while, John’s self purification through flogging and starvation brings him peace. You can tell he reconciles the two worlds by incorporating punishments from both. Although he believes himself to be purified, the thought of his lover, Lenina devours him everyday, and ultimately leads to his demise. In the end, John truly “ate civilization.”

Brave New World reaffirms the long held notion that the grass is not always greener. John believes that moving to civilized society will solve the alienation he feels in Malpais. He can never fully divorce himself from both societies to fit the cast of each society. John is left in a limbo, where he heavily scrutinizes both worlds , but learns through his exile that he cannot be apart of two drastically different worlds. John cannot be molded into an interchangeable existence, and chooses to accept the “unhealable rift” thrust onto