Bernard Marx

Outcast, laughed at, and alone

Bernard Marx is a highly intelligent Alpha-Plus. He works as a psychologist in the Conditioning Center. His build and appearance do not correspond to that of an Alpha, but rather that of a Gamma, since alcohol was supposedly accidentally poured into his blood substitute during the embryo maturation process: “He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion” (Chapter 4, 53%)

Due to his physical underdevelopment, he is very shy and he bitterly envies the normal, happy and adjusted men, “..., men who took their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish through water” (Chapter 4, 60%) He avoids dealing with people: “A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity" (Chapter 4, 53%). He has a bad reputation among his colleagues: “The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one” (Chapter 4, 60%). His colleague Henry Foster makes fun of him: “Henry had compared poor Bernard to a rhinoceros” (Chapter 6, 5%)

Bernard is a loner. One day he visits the Solidarity Service where everyone else is intoxicated by the soma and the music: They pray ecstatically and take part in an orgy. Instead of finding peace, he feels “...miserably isolated now as he had been when the service began–more isolated by reason of his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety. Separate and unatoned, while the others were being fused into th...

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