Chapter 8 brave new world summary

Brave New World Chapter 8 Summary



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While Lenina and Linda
bond
with each other inside, Bernard and John are outside talking.

Bernard is having a hard time dealing with the reality of the Reservation. It baffles him that there could be two such worlds in coexistence.

He asks John to tell him his whole story, from the very beginning.

John launches into his life story:

Little John is lying down in bed with his mom, and she's singing him to sleep. When he wakes up, a man is trying to sleep with his mom. Linda says, "Not with John here," so the man forcibly removes John, locking him in a different room of the house while he has sex with Linda.

He also remembers a dark room with women making blankets. He remembers Linda telling him to play with the other children and her being angry at the people for being such savages.

There's also a man named Popé who brings mescal (it's like tequila) over to the house and has lots of sex with Linda.

Shortly thereafter, Linda is whipped (literally whipped) by the women in the town because she is sleeping with all their men.

When John tries to stop them, he is whipped, too. When he tries to comfort his mothe



Chapter 7



Summary:


The Indian guide leads Bernard and Lenina into the reservation, where the smells and the sight of poverty, disease, and old age immediately assault them. Since there is no live birth in the outside society, Lenina finds the scene of a woman nursing a child to be disgusting. She then discovers that both she and Bernard forgot their soma, so she has to see the village consciously rather than through the veil of the narcotic. However, Bernard feels a strange fascination with the scene. Bernard and Lenina watch a ritual dance of sacrifice to the gods Pookong and Jesus, where a young man slowly proceeds around a pile of snakes in the center of the Pueblo square. While walking, the young man receives a whipping until he falls and dies. The other Indians worship a statue of a man on a cross and an eagle.

After the ritual, they meet a blond-haired man with blue eyes. The Savage, whose name is John, tells them that he is upset that the other Indians will not let him participate in the ritual because of his skin color. He explains that his mother was like Lenina, a woman from civilized society, who some hunters had saved. Bernard concludes that John's mother was

Chapter 8 Notes from Brave New World


Brave New World Chapter 8

Bernard asks John to tell him his life story. John starts as far back as he can remember. He remembers Linda singing lullabies from The Other Place to him as a child. One day, he woke with a start to find a man in the bed with Linda. He hears his mother say, "Not with John here." He feels threatened by the man, who proceeds to lift John by his arm and lock him out of the room. John remembers that Linda was upset with him because he was playing with the little boys and because she has been reprimanded for not knowing how to weave. She calls them savages and he does not understand what she means by that.

Popé, who is Linda's lover, who John remembers, brings Linda mescal, a hallucinogenic, in liquid form. Linda likes it because its effect reminds her of soma. John remembers finding Linda being held down by a group of dark women who whip her. He tries to console her after they leave, and she reacts violently, calling him a little idiot and a beast, and shouts that he has become a savage and her becoming pregnant with him has ruined her chances of being able to return to The Other Place. Suddenly, she changes,

UTSIDE, in the dust and among the garbage (there were four dogs now), Bernard and John were walking slowly up and down.


Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed …


The magic was on his side, the magic explained and gave orders. He stepped back in the outer room. "When he is drunk asleep …" The knife for the meat was lying on the floor near the fireplace. He picked it up and tiptoed to the door again. "When he is drunk asleep, drunk asleep …" He ran across the room and stabbed–oh, the blood!–stabbed again, as Popé heaved out of his sleep, lifted his hand to stab once more, but found his wrist caught, held and–oh, oh!–twisted. He couldn't move, he was trapped, and there were Popé's small black eyes, very close, staring into his own. He looked away. There were two cuts on Popé's left shoulder. "Oh, look at the blood!" Linda was crying. "Look at the blood!" She had never been able to bear the sight of blood. Popé lifted his other hand–to strike him, he thought. He stiffened to receive the blow. But the hand only took him under the chin and turned his face, so that he had to look again into Popé's eyes. For a long time, for hours and hours. And suddenly–he couldn't help it–he began