Characters in Huxley's Brave New World

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THOMAS / 'TOMAKIN', 'THE DIRECTOR'

administrator in the year 632AF of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The Director runs a futuristic baby-factory where the assembly-line production of genetic castes is streamlined and controlled, and maturing youngsters are brainwashed via neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia ["sleep-learning"] into being happy with their state-allotted roles in life. The Director is an intelligent but orthodox-minded Alpha; he frowns on Bernard's individualism. His manner is charmless, self-important and didactic. The Director is disgraced after a sordid sex-scandal in his past is revealed. It transpires he is father of John the Savage, conceived after he impregnated Linda on a trip to the New Mexico Savage Reservation.

BERNARD MARX

a sleep-learning specialist at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Bernard is a misfit. He is unusually short for an Alpha; an accident with alcohol in Bernard's blood-surrogate before his decanting has left him slightly stunted. Bernard's independence of mind stems more from his inferiority-complex and depressive nature than any depth of philosophical conviction. Unlike his fellow utopians, Bernard is often angry, resentful and jealous. At times, he is also cowardly and hypocritical. His conditioning is clearly incomplete. He doesn't enjoy communal sports, solidarity services, or promiscuous sex. He doesn't even get much joy out of soma. Bernard is in love with the highly beddable Lenina. He doesn't like her sleeping with other men, though in BNW "everyone belongs to everyone else". Bernard's triumphant return to utopian civilisation with John the Savage from the Reservation precipitates the downfall of the Director, who had been planning to exile him. Bernard's triumph is short-lived. Success goes to his head. Despite his tearful pleas, he is ultimately banished to an Island for his non-conformist behaviour.

JOHN THE SAVAGE

the illicit son of the Director and Linda. He was born and reared on the Savage Reservation ("Malpais") after Linda was unwittingly left behind by her errant lover. John the Savage is an outsider both on the Reservation - where the ignorant natives still practise marriage, natural birth, family life and religion - and the ostensibly civilised Brave New World: a totalitarian welfare-state based on principles of stability and happiness, albeit happiness of a shallow and insipid nature. The Savage has read nothing but The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. He quotes them extensively and, for the most part, aptly, though his allusion to "Brave New World" [Miranda's words in The Tempest] takes on a darker and bitterly ironic resonance as the novel unfolds.

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