NovelGuide: Brave New World: Novel Summary: Chapter 14

Chapter 14

This chapter details the events surrounding Linda’s inevitable death and the Savages guilt-ridden visit to the Hospital where she is dying. The nurses at the hospital can’t understand his apparent grief at the loss of his mother. Huxley even admits that they usually don’t get many visitors there. This is because no one cares about death in this society; it’s nothing more than one individual among an endless mass.

When the Savage finally reaches Linda’s bed, he finds her drugged out on soma and he can’t communicate with her. At this time the Savage feels a blur of different emotions— guilt, sadness, loneliness. He feels that the only person who ever meant anything to him in the world is leaving and soon he will have to face the world alone. Huxley narrates, "He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories— back into the present, back into reality; the appalling present, the awful reality— but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that made them so fearful."

Soon a Bokanovsky Group of Deltas who are being death conditioned surround the Savage and his dying mother. The Savage is outraged at the lack of respect for Linda and soon begins pushing the children and yelling at the nurses, despite their protests that his behavior will harm their death conditioning.