Chapter Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen

John goes to th hospital because his mother Linda is now dying. However, when he goes to visit her, she is so heavily medicated that she has no idea what is going on. In addition there is also a group of delta twins who are coming to watch his mother die so that they may be conditioned into accepting death. Within minutes Linda is dead and John is terribly distraught but to his surprise the woman with the deltas tells him to please be quiet and not to interfere with the children's conditioning.

I was pretty repulsed by this event. In our society the idea of death is a horrible tragedy so I can't even imagine the idea of not being able to mourn over the dead because I would have been conditioned otherwise. It horrified me that as he is torn apart by the loss of his mother, children are standing there being taught that death is meaningless and that the loss of one person means nothing. In my opinion, that is completely ridiculous but then again this is only a novel and this really shows the contrast with the society of this novel and that of our everyday life.

This seems like a good reason that someone would feel that this book should be banned. As death is represented as sacred and tragic in our society some people would not want that sacredness to be attacked by this book. Although it is only fiction, people may fear the idea that if someone read in this book that the loss of one person is meaningless that they might just go and kill someone because they may be under the impression that one life lost won't matter. However let me restate that this book is FICTIONAL!

As John his in distress he leaves the hospital and sees a group of children being given soma. He is in a strange state of mind at this moment and demands that these children stop putting poison in their bodies. He creates a riot and Bernard, Helmholtz and the police end up coming to the scene. Bernard and Helmholtz try to defend John and Bernard, Helmholtz and John are all taken away by the police. This point seems like the climax of the novel because John has finally snapped. His mind cannot survive in the World State because he cannot survive there. John trying to live in the World State would be like a fish trying to live on land. His oxygen are things like love and freedom to believe whatever he wants while in the World State their oxygen is the conditioning that they have received since birth. Like the fish, he can survive there for a while, but the fish needs it's water as John needs his world. In his case he won't die, but he seems merely become more and more isolated.

The three of them are taken to be spoken to by Mustapha Mond. They discuss what will be happening to these three very rebellious men. We learn that they won't really be receiving punishment but offered a new sense of freedom. Earlier it was mentioned that Bernard was going to be sent to an island but little did we know that those islands that people are sent to contain people who were unsatisfied by the conditioned life. People just like Bernard, Helmholtz and John. It seems that the tables have turned because as I thought that the idea of individualism in this novel was frowned upon it seems that if you do begin to become individual from the mass of the conditioned you are merely taken out of the equation and put with more people like yourself. In a way I guess it is somewhat of a punishment because the three of these men will likely be sent to different places and be separated but really they will likely have a more enriched life full of the most interesting people they have ever met. In the end it seems they will be able to escape the monotony of the World State and finally be free.