He quotes from other plays of Shakespeare, as if he scorned the outcry against the dramatist. Discarding the traditions of the new world, he reads Romeo and Juliet, and feels romantically inclined towards Lenina. Huxley seems to have introduced him for a satirical purpose. With his dislike for the new world, John the Savage seems to prefer the old world from where he has been brought here.
The suicide of the Savage is an extreme form of his protest against the mechanical life in the mass community for which he is unable to grow a liking. According to Karl and Magalaner, “The only way Huxley could give both absolute and relative meaning to his new world was through the introduction of a non-conformist-specifically, an outsider from the world of the twentieth century.” (Great Twentieth Century English Novels, pp. He remains a pathetic figure of an alien in a strange land, having a nostalgia for his native land. The Savage does not originally belong to the new world he has been brought into, nor can he grow a liking for it.
Go to top A Non-Conformist and an Outsider And at the close, of course, he is made to retreat from sanity: his native penitente -ism reasserts its authority and he ends in maniacal sell-torture and despairing suicide.” (“Foreword’, Brave New World, pp. Even his acquaintance with Shakespeare would not in reality justify such utterances. As Huxley tells us, “For the sake of dramatic effect, the Savage is often permitted to speak more rationally than his upbringing among the practitioners of a religion that is half-fertility cult and half Penitente ferocity would actually warrant. The situation in which John is placed may also be said to be abnormal or implausible hence he has to speak and behave in a manner which is hardly in accordance with native character. “It is not in the least an artistic error that John should be an implausible character, a concoction of antithesis to the sphere in which he is placed, because any serious attempt to make him realistic would have broken the unity of the novel.” (Ibid.). Nor are the circumstances of his life normal or plausible. John the Savage is an abnormal and implausible character who does not seem to have been taken from real life. John may be regarded as an amusing character. or informs Lenina that she an ‘impudent strumpet’, he is funny but not ludicrous or unlikeable.” (Ibid., p. When he replies to question on the telephone by saying, “If I do not usurp myself, I am’. The laughter which he sometimes arouses is never unsympathetic. Keith May is of the view that “John becomes a part of the comedy through various later incidents, such as his refusal of Lenina’s advances, and particularly through his Shakespearean diction. He is a part of the comedy embodied in the novel. John the Savage, a Comic Figureĭespite his strange position and pitiable predicament, the Savage has also been able to evoke laughter among the readers. John’s lot arouses pity in the reader’s heart. Fatherless, he has been brought up by a drunken, sporadically-loving mother who is hated and has been assaulted before his eyes by her neighbours, whose sexual activities have often taken place within his earshot, and who has filled his head with mythologies which conflict with those of the Reservation.” (Aldous Huxley, p. According to Keith May, “John … is so completely the antithesis of the scientifically conditioned members of society as to have had inflicted upon him what seems to be almost every category of psycho-pathological experience. John has to suffer much humiliation at the hands of various persons and society as well as because of the situation in which he is placed. It is this conflict between the two value systems that ultimately brings about his suicide.” (Huxley’s “Brave New World”, p. His old-fashioned beliefs about God and right and wrong (his beliefs closely duplicate Christian morality) contrast sharply with the values and beliefs of the citizens of the Brave New World. His beliefs and values are a curious mixture of Christian and heathen, of Jesus and Pookong, but, most important, he has a strict moral code. Gannon points out, “he acts as a bridge between the two cultures, and having known both ‘ways of life’ he is able to compare them and comment on them. He is the most important figure in the novel, because, as Paul W. John the Savage, is the central character in Brave New Worl d.
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