John The Savage In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Transplanted into a strange, new world beyond different from his own, John the “Savage” is quite the fish out of water. Throughout his journey in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, John is now having to deal with people and customs that are all governed by science and conditioned to be the perfect specimen. In this new world, everyone is healthy, everyone is conditioned the same exact way, and certain customs such as parenting, marriage, religion, and mourning the dead are thought to be a waste of human emotion and work. As Mustapha Mond said: “God in the safe and Ford on the shelves…For the same reason as we don’t give them Othello: they’re old; they’re about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now (Page 157, 158).” When the audience is first introduced to John, he and his mother, Linda, are living on the Reservation in New Mexico and immediately he has a connection to Lenina who reciprocated such feelings, “He had seen, for the first time in his life, the face of
After his mother’s death, John ultimately begins to decline even more than he already was. “Sitting beside her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. ‘A, B, C, vitamin D,’ he repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past to life (Page 138).” He suffers knowing that he is now they only one that is different and that there is virtually no way to change that. Being brought to the World State is ultimately led to John’s suicide because from the moment he, Linda, Lenina, and Bernard returned from the reservation he was an oddity, a rare find, a different person from anybody else and he was treated as such. His beliefs were belittled and thrown away because they were “out of date” and there was no room for old things in the new