The Death of The Savage

    Many crazy events can take place without people really grasping the reality of the situation, but when a death results from those events, people start to pay attention. In Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, John Savage was a misfit within his Native American reservation until Bernard brought him back to the World State located in London. The people he met and things he experienced, along with his struggle with sin in a sin-filled world, led to his eventual suicide.   
    The World State was the genious creation of Huxley and showed what happens when a government goes  to extreme lenghts make its citizens content. At an early age, humans are produced without a mother or father, and conditioned through repetition not to do anything moderately out of the ordinary. A class system is strictly enforced, and daily soma doses keep the population in a happily drugged state. As someone coming from the 'outside' world, John represents something out of the ordinary. Immediately red flags pop up in the reader's mind; in a society so rigidly controlled, something so wild and untamed cannot mean anything good. However, John becomes an instant sensation, and people come from all over the city to speak with him. Bernard, the man who brought him to London from the reservation, is enjoying his newly found popularity as well. The pattern of change, however, contains a foreboding feeling as the novel progresses.
    The dynamic between John and Bernard changes when Bernard's love interest, Lenina, begins showing interest in John.  John, as a devotely religious young man, resists whatever advances Lenina makes on him. The artificiality of the World State society has little effect on John. He continues to hang on to his memories of real feelings that he experienced on the reservation, whether they were bad or good. His emotions come to a peak when he is called to the death bed of his mother. After her drawn-out, drug-soaked death, John invokes a riot in which he throws the daily soma rations of some workers out of a window. Bernard is also involved in this fiasco, and unfortunately, he loses his popularity just as quickly as he recieved in. John's raw emotions are very out of place in the society he finds himself in, so he decides to isolate himself from the world. He goes to the middle of the forest and lives by himself in a tower, living off the natural land and reverting back to what his life was like on the reservation. However, certain antics he creates, like whipping himself as a part of an Indian tradition he was denied, draws the attention of the media and public. The pervasiveness of the World State society finally engulfs John, and he gives into a soma induced orgy when a host of people discover his tower. His guilt is overwhelming the next day, as he realizes what took place the night before. Knowing there is no way he can live with his guilt, John hangs himself.
    When the media arrives the next day to observe more happenings, they find just Johns body swaying in the wind. The author describes his feet as if they were the needle on a compass, rotating "north, north-east, east...". This symbolizes the moral compass that the World State society is missing. All of their innovations: the conditioning, helicopters, soma, mean nothing if no one cares about their actions. The death of the savage illuminates the need for a moral standard in a society that has none.