Tuesday, March 8, 2016

In Brave New World, how are Linda and John different from the other savages, and why is Lenina disgusted by Linda?

Having read Shakespeare extensively, John develops a complexity of thought that alienates him from the others on the reservation as well as later in the New World.  Blond-haired and with blue eyes, John does not match any of the other savages in appearance, and he certainly does not match any others in intellectual considerations.  In fact, he seems an incarnation of a Shakespearean hero:  complex in thought--too complex for either world--and tragic in nature as he cannot reconcile his lines from The Tempest ["O brave new world"...]with what he encounters in the New World. 


At the novel's end, in fact, allusions are made to Macbeth-- "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death"-- and to Hamlet-- "And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods.....No more than sleep.  Sleep. Perchance to dream....For in that sleep of death, what dreams?"


Like Macbeth, John the Savage finds himself in the "shadow" of death, and looks up at the helicopter of his destruction that looms overhead; his mind wanders "in that other world of truer-than-truth."  John cannot fit into either the reservation or the New World of conditioning and falseness of life; thus he enters "that sleep of death."

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