Thinking about Othello, for example, John is much like the character of Othello, a man somewhat isolated from others because of his different skin color. The other Shakespeare plays provide similar analogies for John's life. (Bernard is even physically deformed a little bit, just like Caliban.) On the other hand, Bernard, who totally lets his friend down, is more like Caliban. As for the tricksy little spirits, Helmholtz seems benevolent and serves John well, so you could say he is like Ariel. Prospero is the authority making all this happen, so he's analogous to either a very absent God or a very present Mustapha Mond. In a way, he's also like Ferdinand, what with being a man and all, which makes Lenina a promiscuous version of the virginal Miranda. If you want to see Brave New World as a parody, John is like Miranda, because he's faced with a whole new world that holds largely sexual temptations. She's the one who delivers the line, "Oh brave new world, that has such people in it," when she sees all the men who have been shipwrecked on her island.
Miranda, who's never seen a man before other than her father, falls in love with the first one she sees, Prince Ferdinand, and they spend the whole play trying not to have sex with each other before they get married.
#Brave new world quotes about freedom full#
Prospero knows magic, so he shipwrecks a boat full of his enemies on the island.
In case you haven't read The Tempest, it goes something like this: Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been exiled on an island with two spirits: the mostly good Ariel and the generally bad Caliban. In fact, we think if you really wanted to, you could probably read the novel as a twisted parody of Shakespeare's play. The Tempest really warrants the biggest discussion here, since it features most prominently in Brave New World (the title is a big giveaway). The idea is that that man in his natural state, untouched by modernity and technology, is somehow more pure and less corrupted than the civilized man.) But let's start with Shakespeare. (The Noble Savage = a grand concept and term that gets thrown around a lot in literary criticism circles. Somehow or another, his character ends up representing Jesus, John the Baptist, Othello, Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, and the epitome of the Noble Savage. Part of the reason that reality is so messy for John is that he's carrying a big burden. After all, hasn't he just proven to himself that mythical worlds exist? If anything, finally seeing the "other place" with his own eyes probably makes it more difficult for him to treat Shakespeare or religion as myth. It's easy to see how this happened John grew up hearing myths of the World State just as he heard stories of Jesus or Awonawilona or Shakespeare's characters. But did you notice that, in times of distress, John turns either to Shakespeare or to Zuñi to express himself? More mashing up of different worlds. The station master boasts that the Bombay Green Rocket can move at "twelve hundred and fifty kilometers an hour," to which John replies: "Still, Ariel could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes." Now he's mixing up the actuality of technology with the fiction of literature. It gets even more complicated when we add Shakespeare to the mix. John can't draw a line between the indisputable reality that is the World State and the various religious beliefs he has picked up. There's a great paragraph in Chapter 8 in which John mashes these different realms together, and it ends with this: "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." Already you've got Christianity, Native American religion, and the "civilized" world mixed up in his mind as equally real or equally mythic. For John, life is a problem of reconciling different worlds.Īnd, as we've come to expect, Huxley makes this pretty explicit for us. While this makes for a great social experiment, it's incredibly difficult on the poor guy. From Shakespeare to the Bible to the creation myths of the Reservation to the stories he hears about the civilized world, John's conscience is an equal-opportunity employer. (Click the character infographic to download.) John's Different Worlds
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