In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley expresses how being cut off from your family, home, and birthplace, can be both enriching and alienating to a person, contributing to the theme of happiness over the truth. Huxley utilizes the character John, also known as the savage, in order to magnify the repercussions of being cut off from your family and to express how being separated from his mother augmented John into a stronger person. Throughout the novel, many characters are shown to choose their happiness, in the form of soma, over the truth of the world. However, because John was different from everyone else, he chose the truth of his suffering over the possibility of false happiness.
John’s home was found in his mother and him growing apart from her left him feeling that his life was now hopeless and without meaning. However, unlike his mother and all of London, he chose not to fix this suffering with soma. Instead, John lived in seclusion in his room, mourning what he once had with his mother and imagining what could have been. This estrangement hurt John because he lost the only relationship he ever had, the only home …show more content…
139) was in fact a cruel, conformed society that taught that it was better to be happy that to know the truth. John began to see the negative impact of soma and came to the realization that freedom was the ability to have your own feelings and not be bound by the chains of happiness. This is shown when John ruined the soma distribution saying, “Don’t you want to be free and men?” (Pg. 213). After losing his mother, John finally saw that he was only free because he could feel pain because of his loss, whereas everyone else was unknowingly ignorant to the treacheries of the world. John had finally discovered he was more than just the savage born from a civilized being and was in fact the only free being