Quote 21
The Savage shook his head. "Listen to this," was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:
Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be…
Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At "sole Arabian tree" he started; at "thou shrieking harbinger" he smiled with sudden pleasure; at "every fowl of tyrant wing" the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at "defunctive music" he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read on (12.65-7)
For Helmholtz, Shakespeare isn't just about the language—it's about the subject matter. As he said earlier, one can only write piercingly if one is writing about things that matter. He recognizes from this passage that the text is doing just that—it's writing about passion, danger, and emotion.
Quote 22
"Listen, I beg of you," cried the Savage earnestly. "Lend me your ears…" He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say. "Don't take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's poison." (15.20)
It's interesting that John finds himself at first ineloquent, given that he's had so much experience with the greatest works of literature. But this raises an important question: does John think for himself, or does he simply regurgitate Shakespeare's words? He certainly uses Shakespeare as a safety net here…
Quote 23
The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."
"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art." (16.28-9)
Does Mustapha's argument about happiness make sense here? It seems as though he's basing everything on the claim that "happiness" is only possible in a state of ignorance…
Quote 24
"Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are?" Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. "Don't you?" he repeated, but got no answer to his question. "Very well then," he went on grimly. "I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to or not." And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in handfuls out into the area. (15.37)
John moves rather quickly from the "ineloquence" of inexperience to the "fluency" of rage. Passion, the text seems to argue, is not only a part of the human experience, but in fact enables the human experience—with passion, man can be an individual, can have an opinion, and can disagree, fight, and interact in a way that isn't otherwise possible.
Quote 25
"Free, free!" the Savage shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma into the area while, with the other, he punched the indistinguishable faces of his assailants. "Free!" And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side —"Good old Helmholtz!"—also punching—"Men at last!"—and in the interval also throwing the poison out by handfuls through the open window. "Yes, men! men!" and there was no more poison left. He picked up the cash-box and showed them its black emptiness. "You're free!"
Howling, the Deltas charged with a redoubled fury. (15.41-2)
Check out the line, "Men at last!" What John is probably getting at here is the notion of infants as opposed to adults. Without soma, these Deltas can be adults—can be men—instead of bottled babies. This is exactly what Bernard was getting at with Lenina when he told her that they shouldn't have gone to bed "like infants."
Quote 26
"But why is it prohibited?" asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else.
The Controller shrugged his shoulders. "Because it's old; that's the chief reason. […] Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones." (16.14-7)
Mustapha essentially imprisons the citizens of the World State by removing their ability to choose. If they can't see any alternative to the present (think of the hypnopaedic saying "was and will make me ill"—it's all about living in the moment), they can't wish for anything different. This is why the past is dangerous; it offers alternatives.
Quote 27
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last. (17.62-6)
John finally puts the proper name on the freedom that he, Helmholtz, and (at one point) Bernard all claimed: the freedom to suffer.
Quote 28
The Savage shook his head. "He wouldn't let me […]. He said he wanted to go on with the experiment. But I'm damned," the Savage added, with sudden fury, "I'm damned if I'll go on being experimented with. Not for all the Controllers in the world. l shall go away to-morrow too." (18.25-7)
John is free from Mustapha's control because he chooses to be. He reminds us that, in fact, any citizen in the World State could leave at any time. (Although, if they've been conditioned not to want to leave, we have to ask if freedom is preemptively made impossible.)
Quote 29
"But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death…"
"But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it."
The Savage nodded gloomily. At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could never escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone. (17.31-3)
Which does John find worse—the state of constant isolation, or that of forced social interaction?
Quote 30
"What's in those" (remembering The Merchant of Venice) "those caskets?" the Savage enquired when Bernard had rejoined him.
"The day's soma ration," Bernard answered rather indistinctly; for he was masticating a piece of Benito Hoover's chewing-gum. "They get it after their work's over. Four half-gramme tablets. Six on Saturdays." (11.75-6)
We see the same thing here; the gum that Bernard is chewing made its first appearance in Chapter 3, when Benito was offering it to a disgruntled (and very different) Bernard.
Quote 31
"Free, free!" the Savage shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma into the area while, with the other, he punched the indistinguishable faces of his assailants. "Free!" And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side—"Good old Helmholtz!"—also punching—"Men at last!"—and in the interval also throwing the poison out by handfuls through the open window. "Yes, men! men!" and there was no more poison left. He picked up the cash-box and showed them its black emptiness. "You're free!"
Howling, the Deltas charged with a redoubled fury. (15.41-2)
John is the only character to relate the notion of imprisonment to that of soma. Of course, as Mustapha will later point out, trying to explain this to any conditioned individual is impossible.
Quote 32
"Oh, you so perfect" (she was leaning towards him with parted lips), "so perfect and so peerless are created" (nearer and nearer) "of every creature's best." Still nearer. The Savage suddenly scrambled to his feet. "That's why," he said speaking with averted face, "I wanted to do something first… I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn't absolutely un-worthy. I wanted to do something." (13.41)
Like Bernard and Helmholtz, John also struggles with an identity crisis. He needs to prove both to Lenina and to himself that he a man of principle, strength, and honor.
Quote 33
"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 34
"Once," he went on, "I did something that none of the others did: I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer, with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross."
"What on earth for?"
"I wanted to know what it was like being crucified. Hanging there in the sun…"
"But why?"
"Why? Well…" He hesitated. "Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus could stand it." (8.69-73)
Much of John's self-inflicted suffering is the product of his spiritual upbringing.
Quote 35
A click; the room was darkened; and suddenly, on the screen above the Master's head, there were the Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady, and wailing as John had heard them wail, confessing their sins before Jesus on the Cross, before the eagle image of Pookong. The young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter. Still wailing, the Penitentes rose to their feet, stripped off their upper garments and, with knotted whips, began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans.
"But why do they laugh?" asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.
"Why?" The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. "Why? But because it's so extraordinarily funny." (11.54-6)
We argue in John's "Character Analysis" that he's basically like a spiritual sponge. This is a great example; he sees the Penitentes abusing themselves in the name of God, so he does the same thing to himself at the end of the novel.
Quote 36
"Oh, God, God, God…" the Savage kept repeating to himself. In the chaos of grief and remorse that filled his mind it was the one articulate word. "God!" he whispered it aloud. "God…" (14.55)
John turns to God not only because of Linda's death, but also because of the reaction to her death by others around him. It is this reaction that makes him realize how inhumane this community is, how "such people" live in this "brave new world."
Quote 37
"They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; […] Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses." (17.20)
This would seem to be the way that John experiences religion; there are certain, key moments in the text where he obtains sudden resolve, where he claims sudden clarity or instantaneous revelation.
Quote 38
The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"
"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. […] One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to." (17.29-30)
This is a great point—and it's passages like these that make some scholars believe Brave New World is a critique of any sort of religion. As readers, we rebel against the notion of hypnopaedia because it seems to us like brainwashing; but from this point of view, religious doctrine isn't too different.
Quote 39
"Do you remember that bit in King Lear?" said the Savage at last. "'The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes,' and Edmund answers—you remember, he's wounded, he's dying—'Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true. The wheel has come full circle; I am here.' What about that now? Doesn't there seem to be a God managing things, punishing, rewarding?"
"Well, does there?" questioned the Controller in his turn. "You can indulge in any number of pleasant vices […] and run no risks of having your eyes put out." (17.34-5)
Mustapha refuses to take into account any conception of divine justice or the afterlife. If there are no punishments during life, in Mustapha's mind there must be no punishments at all.
Quote 40
"You're more like what you were at Malpais," he said, when Bernard had told him his plaintive story. "Do you remember when we first talked together? Outside the little house. You're like what you were then."
"Because I'm unhappy again; that's why."
"Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here." (12.45-7)
John is dissatisfied with the same aspects of the World State that bothered Bernard in earlier chapters. In this way, John effectively replaces Bernard as the novel's protagonist.