How Does Huxley Create Identity In Brave New World

John the Savage, of Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, loses his sense of identity when he becomes an outsider to the two very different communities. In the Reservation, John is the only child ever born from two New World citizens, and the villagers ostracize him for his differences. To cope with the isolation, John begins to create an idealist expectation of the World State, combining the fantasy of Shakespeare and the stories Linda tells him. Yet when Bernard brings John back to London, he rejects the World State and all its ideals. His combination of fiction and reality, that began as way to cope with the ostracism on the Reservation, prevents John from accepting the World State, and he is unable to handle being the outsider of two worlds.

This lack of community leads to John’s suicide at end of the novel.

As the only member of New World on the Reservation, Linda, John’s mother, is unaware of the native’s customs.

This is a source of major tension between Linda and the other villagers, and on no fault of John’s, the other village boys exclude him, and he is rarely able to take part in the village’s coming of age milestones. For example, it is village tradition for every young boy to climb into the kiva on the full moon, and at sunrise he will emerge a man. Yet when it is John’s turn, “…the man struck him, pulled his hair. "Not for you, white-hair!" "Not for the son of the she-dog," said one of the other men…the last of the boys had climbed down the ladder. He was all alone.” The boys leave John out of an event that would be cause for celebration in the village. From these experiences, John cannot help but feel alone and an outsider to the culture. The natives treat John as though he belongs in the New World, when the reservation, is all John

knows.

As an outsider on the reservation, John spends a lot of his time alone, crafting the perfect world, based off his mother’s stories of civilization and his readings of Shakespeare to the point where John is unable to distinguish reality from nonreality. In Chapter 8, Huxley describes John, "Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World Hatcheries and Awonawilona" (Huxley A Brave New World 128). To John, the idea of “London” and the “Director of World Hatcheries” are as foreign and abstract as the Christian and Native American religious beliefs.

John’s undistinguishable reality is the main reason he feels as though he is an outsider with a failing sense of identity, when Bernard brings him to the London.

The expectation for the World State that John has held on to for years, in no way matches the reality that confronts him when he arrives. Instead of a society that combines the safety and security of the world Linda describes, and ideas of monogamy and passion put into his head by Shakespeare, a society with practices of promiscuity and carelessness is greets him. The literary critic, Rudolf B. Schmerl, describes John as “the traveler in Utopia, the alien between whom and the natives no true understanding is possible, a Brobdingnagian among Gullivers” (Schmerl “Creating Fantasy”). John is unable to come to terms with the idea of taking soma or engage in any of the promiscuity that the world state considers normal and because of this the citizens of the World State see John as irrational and strange. Unable to find a community that accepts and understand his believes, John isolates himself on the island, where sinks into a deep depression that ends with his

suicide.

By the end of the novel, A Brave New World, it is indisputable that John’s differences make make him the outsider. In the Reservation, the native boys exclude John because he and his mother are the only individuals from the New World in the village. In the New World, John’s different interpretation of reality isolates himself from the rest of society. His experiences from the reservation and reading Shakespeare give John a different reality than that which the World State presents to him. Unable to accept the World State circumstances as reality, John refuses to partake in any of the societal norms of civilization, and this leads to his decision to isolate himself.