Brave new world chapter 7

Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses





Chapter 7 Summary



In the beginning pages of Chapter 7, Lenina is exposed for the first time to the ways of life on the Reservation Malpais. She sees old age for the first time, as opposed to life in the World State, in which, as Marx says, “Youth persists almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end” (111). She sees infirmity and a dead dog, finding the sights “terrible” (111), and asks several times to go. She also realizes she has forgotten her soma and cannot escape the horrible things she is witnessing. This comes to a head when their guide takes them to view a violent ritual, set to drum music, involving masked men with whips, snakes, and images of an Eagle and the Christian depiction of Jesus on the cross. The ritual climaxes with the whipping (either to death or very near it) of a young boy, until he lies still and prone in the square, at which point an elder dips an eagle feather in the blood from his back and the ritual ends. Lenina exclaims that the ritual is “too awful.”

In the aftermath of the ceremony, Lenina and Bernard are approached by a white man dressed in Indian garb who speaks “faultless but p


Chapter Seven

HE MESA was like a ship becalmed in a strait of lion-coloured dust. The channel wound between precipitous banks, and slanting from one wall to the other across the valley ran a streak of green-the river and its fields. On the prow of that stone ship in the centre of the strait, and seemingly a part of it, a shaped and geometrical outcrop of the naked rock, stood the pueblo of Malpais. Block above block, each story smaller than the one below, the tall houses rose like stepped and amputated pyramids into the blue sky. At their feet lay a straggle of low buildings, a criss-cross of walls; and on three sides the precipices fell sheer into the plain. A few columns of smoke mounted perpendicularly into the windless air and were lost.

"Queer," said Lenina. "Very queer." It was her ordinary word of condemnation. "I don't like it. And I don't like that man." She pointed to the Indian guide who had been appointed to take them up to the pueblo. Her feeling was evidently reciprocated; the very back of the man, as he walked along before them, was hostile, sullenly contemptuous.

"Besides," she lowered her voice, "he smells."

Bernard did not attempt to deny it. They walked

Brave New World Chapter 7 Summary



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Lenina and Bernard are left at Malpais. Lenina is being whiny— she doesn't like it here, and she doesn't like their Indian guide (mostly because he doesn't smell good).

The guide leads them, amid the sound of beating drums, to the bottom of a three-hundred-foot precipice.

Lenina doesn't like this, either, because it makes her feel small.

Following behind the guide, she and Bernard proceed to climb upwards, finally emerging on a flat deck of stone at the top. Two little Indians come running along, naked and painted, which totally freaks out Lenina. They're also carrying snakes, which doesn't help her comfort level.

When they get to the pueblo, the guide leaves to go in and ask for directions. She can't deal with the general dirtiness, since "cleanliness is next to fordliness."

Bernard reminds her that these people haven't heard of Our Ford, and that they are used to living this way.

The two of them observe an old man climbing down a ladder. Lenina is horrified: she's never seen such an old man before. Bernard explains that they (in the controlled world) have learned to keep people "young" until they're abou



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