Is the most dangerous person in Brave New World.

-

BERNARD MARX

A specialist in sleep-teaching, Bernard does not fit the

uniformity that usually characterizes all members of the same caste.

He is an Alpha of high intelligence and therefore a member of the

elite, but he is small and therefore regarded as deformed. Other

people speculate that too much alcohol was put into his bottle when he

was still an embryo. He dislikes sports and likes to be alone, two

very unusual traits among Utopians. When he first appears, he seems to

dislike casual sex, another departure from the norm. He is unhappy

in a world where everyone else is happy.

At first Bernard seems to take pleasure in his differentness, to

like being a nonconformist and a rebel. Later, he reveals that his

rebellion is less a matter of belief than of his own failure to be

accepted. When he returns from the Savage Reservation with John, he is

suddenly popular with important people and successful with women,

and he loves it. Underneath, he has always wanted to be a happy member

of the ruling class. In the end, he is exiled to Iceland and

protests bitterly.

-

HELMHOLTZ WATSON

Helmholtz, like Bernard, is different from the average Alpha-plus

Intellectual. A mental giant who is also successful in sports and sex,

he's almost too good to be true. But he is a nonconformist who knows

that the world is capable of greater literature than the propaganda he

writes so well- and that he is capable of producing it. When John

the Savage introduces him to Shakespeare, Helmholtz only appreciates

half of it; despite his genius, he's still limited by his Utopian

upbringing. He remains willing to challenge society even if he can't

change it, and accepts exile to the bleak Falkland Islands in the hope

that physical discomfort and the company of other dissidents will

stimulate his writing.

-

JOHN THE SAVAGE

John is the son of two members of Utopia, but has grown up on a

Savage Reservation. He is the only character who can really compare

the two different worlds, and it is through him that Huxley shows that

his Utopia is a bad one.

John's mother, Linda, became pregnant accidentally, a very unusual

event in the brave new world. While she was pregnant, she visited a

Savage Reservation, hurt herself in a fall, and got lost, missing

her return trip to London. The Indians of the Reservation saved her

life and she gave birth to John. The boy grew up absorbing three

cultures: the Utopia he heard about from his mother; the Indian

culture in which he lived, but which rejected him as an outsider;

and the plays of Shakespeare, which he read in a book that survived

from pre-Utopian days.

John, in short, is different from the other Savages and from the

Utopians. He is tall and handsome, but much more of an alien in either

world than Bernard is. John looks at both worlds through the lenses of

the religion he acquired on the Reservation- a mixture of Christianity

and American Indian beliefs- and the old-fashioned morality he learned

from reading Shakespeare. His beliefs contradict those of the brave

new world, as he shows in his struggle over sex with Lenina and his

fight with the system after his mother dies. Eventually, the

conflict is too much for him and he kills himself.

-

LINDA

Linda is John's mother, a Beta minus who sleeps with the Director

and becomes pregnant accidentally, 20 years before the action of the

book begins. She falls while visiting a Savage Reservation, becomes

unconscious, and remains lost until the Director has to leave. She