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Fiction

Notes Self Assessment

State the following sentences are True or False:
1. Bernard immediately becomes famous because he controls the Savage’s social schedule.

2. Bernard holds a party with many of society’s most important people in attendance.
3. Linda goes to the Park Lane Hospital for the dying to see John.
4. Fanny the Savage develops more clearly as a Christ figure.
5. The two men enter Mustapha Mond’s office.
6. Lenina steps out of the helicopter to talk to John.

Analysis

This chapter forms something of an anticlimax after the previous chapter where John cries, “I
claim them all,” thus demanding the right to anything that would make him unhappy. Chapter
18 deals more with the interplay of solitude and society as well as sensuality and religion.
John leaves to recapture everything that civilization no longer has, including religion, love,
remembrance, pain, and abstinence.
One can interpret the lighthouse as a reflection of the Garden of Eden, a utopian creation from
which God had banished humanity for their sin. John hopes that this secluded space will
provide a respite from the dystopia of the modern world. He attempts to repent for his own
sins to reenter the Garden but soon finds that even this space is corrupt.
The deluge of people who come to watch John beat himself with the whip marks the last
chance John has to rejoin society. Lenina’s arrival spurs him into a rage because in his mind
she epitomizes everything evil about her world. She is a sensual being who comes between
John and his mother, she defiles his abstinence, and she makes him forget religion. Thus,
when John sees Lenina, he attacks her.

The ending differs from what the reader would expect. The crowd transforms from demanding
pain to demanding sexual gratification through dance and the cry of “Orgy-porgy.” Huxley
likens the cry to the beat of the Indian music and implies that the power of the crowd eventually
overcomes John, who joins in. Though he could not participate at all in the ritual ceremonies
of the Indian people, he becomes the central sacrifice of this ceremony. Huxley again blurs the
distinctions between the savage society with no technology and the advanced modern society,
leaving open the question of which society is superior. Joining the crowd marks the sacrifice
of John’s individualism. He goes from being one man standing alone against a mob to becoming
a member of that crowd. This sacrifice turns out to be too much for John, and he hangs
himself.
Huxley does not reveal why Mustapha decides to keep John as part of an ongoing experiment,
even though he willingly sends other misfits within the society like Helmholtz and Bernard
to an island. One possibility is that Mustapha views John as a kindred spirit via the Shakespeare
that they have both read. He keeps John because he wants to convert John into rejecting
Shakespeare and into accepting civilized dogma. However, as the ending shows, accepting
society implies giving up John’s individuality, and Mustapha’s experiment fails.

19.2 Summary

• The Director passes through the Centre’s Fertilizing room, admiring the fertilizing and
decanting technologies.

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