In this chapter. John rushes to the Park Lane Hospital for the

Dying, where his mother, Linda, has been taken. All the soma she has

been using has put her into a state of "imbecile happiness." Those

words seldom appear together; joining them creates a phrase of immense

strength that tells us Huxleys' real attitude toward his Utopia.

Seeing her makes John remember the Utopia she described to him when he

was a child, the brave new world in his head that contrasts so

painfully with the Utopia he now lives in.

A group of Delta children comes in for their weekly conditioning

in seeing death as a natural process, and John is furious at their

invasion of his grief. He is also furious when, in her delirium, his

mother fails to recognize him and thinks he is Pope, her chief lover

from the Reservation. Linda dies, and John collapses in tears. This

threatens to destroy the conditioning the Deltas are receiving, and

the nurse in charge has to give them chocolate eclairs to remind

them that death is a natural and happy event.

-

---------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE: Huxley wants to show how monstrous it is to deny the

emotions of grief and loss. He hates a process that conditions

people not to feel those emotions, that sorrow can be erased with

gooey pastry. He doesn't mention any way of learning to experience

mourning without being destroyed by it, though. Perhaps he is

reflecting here his grief over the death of his own mother when he was

only 14.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER_FIFTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

-

John leaves Linda's deathbed and plunges into the midst of the daily

distribution of soma to the Deltas who work in the hospital. He thinks

again of Miranda's words- but mockingly this time- as he looks at

the Deltas, and says, over and over again, "O brave new world." He

feels a challenge in the words, a challenge to turn the nightmare into

something noble, so he tries to stop the distribution of the soma,

telling the Deltas that their precious drug is poison and imagining

that he can urge them to freedom. John is still the Savage, and he has

the savage idea that any person can be free; apparently he still can't

Imagine the real nature of conditioning.

Bernard and Helmholtz learn that John is going mad at the Hospital

for the Dying. They rush to meet him and find they have to save him

from the mob of Deltas, maddened and frustrated because he has

thrown away their soma. The police restore order; although this new

world is one in which everyone is happy and hardly anyone breaks the

law, the police still come when they're needed. Like Bernard's

suspicion of spies at the door in Chapter 4, this scene anticipates

Orwell's 1984, though with a much gentler police state. Helmholtz,

Bernard, and John are arrested. In every stage of this scene,

Bernard seems to be trying to escape the consequences of the

difference between himself and other Utopians that in other moments he