Bernard Marx is one of the few characters in the society which Brave New World describes who still has some human emotion left. Though he desires to belong in the World State society, he often criticizes it because he feels like an outcast. In the beginning of the book Huxley says about Bernard, "the mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects." (Huxley 44) When we first meet Bernard he is inwardly criticizing two men for talking about a woman as if she were a piece of "meat" (Huxley 34), but as we soon come to find out, he is really just intensely jealous of these men because he was born smaller than the rest of his caste and unfortunately, height is a sign of class in this society. Bernard is angry because these men are able to have any woman they want while he is constantly rejected in a society where sexual promiscuity is easily achieved and encouraged.
After Bernard meets John and returns from the Reservation with him, we see a huge change in his character. He uses John as a tool to become more popular and he now does all the things that he formerly ridiculed the other men for doing, including being promiscuous in sex. Bernard even abandons his friend Helmholtz in his rise in popularity when he reacted negatively to his bragging about having six girls in one week. (Huxley 107) Overall, Bernard is proven to be a hypocritical man who criticizes people for accepting the moral code of society but later accepts it himself when he is no longer an outcast.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Electronic.
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