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How Is Brave New World Morally Ambiguous

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Everyone in the real world is ambiguous. In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, three of his characters show realistic moral ambiguity. This concept is when an individual is not a clear protagonist or antagonist. These characters often fail to obey societal standards and lash out, painting them as antagonists; however, they also show love and real human needs, allowing the reader to empathize with them. Moral ambiguity is important because it shows humanity in fiction. Huxley writes his characters without moral clarity to prove that people in the real world are never completely good or bad. Linda is morally ambiguous because she does everything as she is told and is scrutinized nonetheless. She follows every rule with the exception of …show more content…

He is arguably the most outcasted character in the novel. Aside from Linda, every character outside of the reservation has been subjected to conditioning. The children in the reservation are unconditioned, but their parents are as well. John is an unconditioned savage being raised by a beta-minus woman. He is an outcast in both the reservation and the civilized world. Like Linda, John is short-tempered and takes out his frustrations on innocent people. This is shown on page 207 when he pushes a child out of anger. “The savage looked down at him and still without speaking pushed him away. The twin fell on the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not even look round.” (Huxley 207). John is angered easily because he wants very little in life, but his wants are deemed too much. It is unusual for people in this story to want someone to stay alive. This is why ‘death conditioning’ is important to them. It teaches detachment from individuals. “When the individual feels, the community reels.” (Huxley 94). In their society’s view, no human being is important enough for somebody to miss, and when John expresses this natural emotion, he is portrayed as an antagonist that pushes children and delays their conditioning process. Moreover, the reader has a difficult time differentiating whether or not John is ‘the good

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley depicts a dystopian future in which the people are controlled and conditioned to accept their predestined positions and lives. Among the novel's protagonists, one of the most idealistic is John the Savage, who romanticized the world due to his exposure to Shakespearean literature. Throughout the work, John's idealism has both great and harmful effects, and Huxley utilizes John's character to show the perils of blindly following idealistic views. John's idealism stems from his admiration for Shakespeare and his faith in the ability of writing to elevate the human soul. The childhood advancement of John on the Savage Reservation strongly shapes his idealistic beliefs of the World State, which consequently impacts

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In spite of desperate efforts to keep everyone under control through deep conditioning and soma, there is always the one person, the one individual who simply can not fit in, the one person on whom this inhumanity cannot rub off on. Afflicted by the news of getting sent to Iceland Bernard is ironically being liberated, being set free from his captivity where “his punishment is really a reward”. He will get to meet people who, like him, were too much of an individual to settle for less than what they really knew they deserved. Huxley warns of the dangers of enslavement without one’s consent, the ones that may seem harmless such as soma was in this case but in reality causing the greatest damage to the individual. In today’s society, one may

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(Huxley 162) This quote shows the effects of soma, what it can do, and how strong the drug is. This is mind-control by the government because soma creates the hallucination of a utopia when they are actually living in a dystopia where the government demands you take drugs. When John the Savage escapes the corrupt society, the media continues to follow him. The public films him and he loses his mind.

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They may say that in the technically and scientifically advanced society everyone conforms and follows the rules by taking drugs, having sex, using transportation, and ‘liking’ there work, however, those people aren't doing these things because they would normally want to; those people were conditioned to think and participate in that way. The citizens didn't grow up with the ability to form their own opinions, beliefs, and thoughts; the government controlled those parts of them from the day they started growing, before they were even born. John is an example of the imperfections in the government's system concerning science because if the World State wants a Utopia then they need to use all of their scientific advancements on everyone. John is what they call a ‘savage’ because his beliefs are what people in our world would see as normal, however, in Huxley's world these normal attributes are taboo. John hates the World State and eventually killed himself because of the pressures and torments of the government and the citizens of it.

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This demonstration of the power of conditioning makes John hate the World State. John finds out the truth about the World State and perceives the World State society as materialistic, superficial, and immoral. John’s feeling of apprehension ever since arriving at the World State from the Savage Reservations, makes him realize that he never could fit in with this society. Although happiness is the dominating force within the World State, John never finds himself truly happy.

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Aldous Huxley develops the character of John in Brave New World through exile from the World State in order to elucidate the theme of not being able to escape the corruption that is society. After all the hardships John has been through, such as growing up on the Reservation with his mother, whose death also drove him to desperate actions such as starting a riot among some Deltas at the hospital, John was not able to properly cope with his “new life” in the World State. HIs positive view of what the “Other World” would be like was crushed when he realized how horrible and corrupt the people were there, all conditioned in uniformity to create stability. His disgust was only furthered by his exposure to the World State’s use of soma and sexual pleasure to keep people happily occupied. Everything that the people were conditioned and taught to do went against John’s beliefs, so he was understandably upset about it.

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Truth and happiness are two things people desire, and in the novel, an impressive view of this dystopia’s two issues is described. In this society, people are created through cloning. The “World State” controls every aspect of the citizens lives to eliminate unhappiness. Happiness and truth are contradictory and incompatible, and this is another theme that is discussed in “Brave New World” (Huxley 131). In the world regulated by the government, its citizens have lost their freedom; instead, they are presented with pleasure and happiness in exchange.

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