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Bernard Marx and His Social Rise and Fall in Brave New World

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Bernard Marx and His Social Rise and Fall in Brave New World
Bernard Marx and his social rise and fall - Chapters 11/12 In this essay I will describe the social rise and fall of Bernard Marx, a character out of Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World”. Particularly I will deal with the change that takes place in Bernard and how the attitude of the others towards Bernard changes. The moment he gets to know John “the Savage”, the son of the Director, he sees a possibility to get the attention and the respect of the others so Bernard takes John and his mother Linda to London. As soon as they arrive there suddenly everybody wants to meet and spend time with him and John. While Bernard thinks that everybody likes him now because of his discovery of John the others start talking things behind his back like “He won’t find another Savage to help him out a second time,” (p.135 ll.27, 28). Bernard uses his new popularity to sleep with every woman he wants to and he also starts taking a lot of soma, a drug which he refused to take earlier. Consequently it seems that Bernard starts to live his life like the others use to do. He does things he used to refuse in the time he was not accepted in society. Taking everything into consideration it can be said that Bernard’s acceptance in society did not hold on for a long time because he was only treated “as a person of outstanding importance” (p.134 l.15) due to the fact that the others could not meet John without spending time with Bernard. Words: 426

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