Rough Draft

In a dystopian society, marriage, parents, and love act as an outlandish idea to most people. In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, one character chooses to defy societies rules and develop a foreign perspective. Bernard Marx a character that alludes to Karl Marx, a worldly profound philosopher, is a displaced character in the city of a new world London. Compared to the average people of today’s culture, Bernard is considered an outcast and not belonging to his society, making him a target for exile and ridicule. The perception of immoral in Brave New World is the fact that someone would believe in concepts such as marriage, parents, and having feelings. These subjects create internal conflicts within readers because of the absurdity of how inappropriate to the time they are. The portrayal of Bernard Marx in Brave New World, creates images of sympathy towards himself in order to establish the meaning of his character.

            Bernard Marx’s character is directly foiled by the presentation of his love interest Lenina. She is the complete opposite of him; wanting different intentions, appreciating the wrong things, and influencing him to take what he is trying to stay away from. “…why don’t you take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them.” Lenina’s dialogue with Bernard, helps define the alienation of developing individual thoughts; a practice in the book that is considered immoral. But readers are drawn to feel more sympathy to him because they can relate more to his ways of thinking than any other practice in the book. The fact that Brave New World was written fifty years before the current times, is shocking because everything written was predicted. This leads readers to feel sympathy for Bernard because the normality in the book is not socially acceptable now. Having monogamous relationships could be considered disgraceful to some religions, which is also another component that the brave new world is lacking. Lenina’s character did happen to be the foil to Bernard’s character but never really proved to be a significant character in the whole plot.

            “When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicisous with them”. Bernard has a way of making himself stand out. He doesn’t drink soma as often as the rest, he truly tries to enjoy the beautiful things in life, and is a very logical thinker. The fact that these are all qualities of humans now a days, helps connect the readers with Bernard so they can understand his struggles of living with alpha, betas, epsilons and etc, people who don’t quite understand him. He also alludes to Shakespeare various times through out the book to portray his feelings. Bernard is a sympathy gathered character that cannot help but put himself in situations against himself.

            “He was revenging himself on his two friends for liking one another more than they liked him.” With all of Bernard’s indirect remarks and internal dialogue, the audience can’t help but relate to him. His character provides an outsider that deserves to be recognized for innovative ideas.