Brave New World John's Suicide Analysis

John’s suicide was the final event that happened in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. However, John’s suicide didn’t come out of nowhere, there were events in the novel that led up to his death in chapter 18. One of the most important factors that led up to the point where he takes his own life is being an outcast of the two societies he had lived in. John was too different from the peoples of both the Savage Reservation and the World State, he is incompatible with both worlds. John’s life began with him being an outcast of society and it ended with him still being an outcast of society. During his childhood, John was oppressed and outcast from majority of the people that he had lived with. During his childhood, he was living in the Savage Reservation and only heard stories about the World State through his mother but he had never actually visited the World State until he met Bernard and Lenina. John was an outcast of the Savage Reservation because of his mother Linda; she kept sleeping with other men from the reservation and those men’s wives kept hurting her for what she was doing with their husbands. This resulted with John being known as the “son of the she-dog” (136).

That one thing he learned about is a drug the World State has been using for such a long time, the drug is known as soma. Soma was the one thing that John hated the most, it was the thing that killed his mother Linda and John didn’t realize what soma had done to his mother until she had finally died from her addiction in chapter 14. After Linda died, John finally developed a deep hatred for soma and he wanted to save the people of the World State from it. In chapter 15, John, quoting William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, says to a group of deltas “listen, I beg of you...lend me your ears...don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison. Poison to the soul as well as the body “