Rob answers “is Bernard Marx a likeable character?, I...”

Jack Pittorino asked this question about Brave New World:

is Bernard Marx a likeable character?, I want to like the character Bernard but there are times when I start to think he is a wuss and unreliable and I start losing faith in him, thats just how I Feel about the character at the moment

Rob I feel like BNW has two protagonists, who function kind of like binocular lenses (if you'll pardon the metaphor) -- Bernard and John Savage.

Play along…moreI feel like BNW has two protagonists, who function kind of like binocular lenses (if you'll pardon the metaphor) -- Bernard and John Savage.

Play along: if you close one eye, you still have factual information in front of you -- there's he chair, there's the door -- but you lose your depth perception. With both eyes open, we get visual facts and we better understand the relationship between these facts.

I felt this way about Bernard and John. Neither of them is wholly likable, and neither of them alone can give us a full understanding. Looking only through the lens of Bernard left me with some facts, but it was a monocular view that left me dissatisfied. He begins to introduce us to the flaws inherent in his society, but we aren't quite fully equipped to make judgments yet. When the character of John comes into play, we start to see it through his lens, and our perception of reality is more rich. John by himself would be equally as unsatisfying as Bernard by himself, but together they give us depth.

TLDR: Bernard is intelligent yet selfish, and not completely likable; but I think he's only one half of our mechanism for understanding Huxley's Truth.(less)

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