Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
“A world where everyone is happy, no one suffers, and something irreplaceable has been destroyed.”
Character Analysis
Born on a Savage Reservation to a World State mother, educated entirely by Shakespeare, John is a man of enormous emotional capacity and no viable world to live in. His Shakespearean inner life makes him the most fully human character in the novel — and the most completely unable to survive. His tragedy is not simply that the World State destroys him; it's that his own idealism participates in his destruction. He cannot accept Lenina because he's made her a symbol; he cannot accept the World State because he's read a better world in books; he cannot return to the Reservation because he was never truly accepted there. He dies rotating, like a compass without north.
Shakespearean cadences, archaic pronouns, formal vocatives ('thou,' 'thee,' 'dost'). Emotionally unguarded to a degree impossible for World State citizens. Biblical reference alongside Shakespeare. When in extremis, his sentences break and he speaks in pure quotation.