Brave New World

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 peculiar English” (116).