Brave New World Identity Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Part.Paragraph)

Quote #22

He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw—knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Twins, twins.… Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda's death. Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. He halted and, with bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the midst of which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. "How many goodly creatures are there here!" The singing words mocked him derisively. "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world…" (15.3)

John resorts to thinking of the bokanovskified twins as animals, but this is a coping mechanism. To face the thought of multiplied, identical humans is disgusting and unbearable, so he mentally strips them of their humanity.

Quote #23

"But do you like being slaves?" the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. "Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking," he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. "Yes, puking!" he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. (15.37)

Again, John has trouble recognizing any sort of humanity in these people; in his mind, their identities shift from "maggots" to that of "less than human monsters."

Quote #24

"We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. […] as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end…" (17.20)

These words are quoted by Mustapha from Cardinal Newman's writings. Amazingly, these words about God can also be applied to the World State and its society. The citizens are "not [their] own masters," they are certainly not independent, and they definitely did not make themselves. Hmm!