I recently finished reading Brave New World. Of course, it's a classic, and so much has already been written about the book — its idea of utopia, the society it imagines, and what might be good or deeply wrong about a world like that.
But what I found myself thinking about most was Bernard. So rather than the book as a whole, I wanted to write about him in particular.
Not necessarily because I liked him. In fact, I found him frustrating at times.
Bernard begins the story as someone who doesn't quite belong. He is different. He feels rejected by the society around him, and in return, he becomes deeply critical of it. He questions the way everyone lives. He seems to despise what other people value and positions himself as someone who sees through it all.
At first, I quite liked this side of Bernard. He seemed to be one of the few people who could see clearly what was happening around him.
And then something changes. People start to like him. He receives the attention and recognition he never had before.
And almost immediately, he begins enjoying the very world he used to criticise.
That was the part I found fascinating.
Because it made me wonder:
Do you really not want to belong or did they just not choose you?
Sometimes, we tell ourselves we don't want to belong. We criticise the room, the people in it, the things they value.
But sometimes, the truth is harder to admit:
We didn't reject them. They rejected us first.
And if one day that same room opened its doors, welcomed us in, and made us feel important — would we still believe everything we once said?
It's easy to stand against something when it doesn't choose us.
The harder question is:
Would you still stand by what you believe if the world you criticised suddenly started applauding you?
I don't think this necessarily makes Bernard a terrible person. If anything, I found him quite sad.
He wanted to believe he was above a society that didn't accept him, but somewhere underneath all that anger, perhaps he simply wanted to be accepted by it.
And I think there are many versions of Bernard in real life — around us and, sometimes, in ourselves too.
There can be a difference between the person we believe ourselves to be and the person who appears when we finally get the thing we thought we didn't want.
Maybe knowing ourselves also means being honest about the parts of us that don't quite match who we thought we were.