Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. This facet of Bernard’s character will be brought into play as the novel progresses.OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. It comes from a sense that he might never fully belong to that society. It is worth noting that the novel explicitly establishes that Bernard’s dissatisfaction with the State stems from his own isolation within it, introducing Bernard with the words “Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.” Bernard may be a rebel, but that rebellion does not come from any ideological objection to the World State. His discomfort with the commodification of sex marks him as a misfit. Bernard is the sole character to protest-almost silently-the way the system works. The sexual play of the children at recess, the boys’ discomfort at the word mother,Lenina’s relaxed nakedness, and the conversation between Henry and the Predestinator all serve to illustrate how the traditional taboos regarding sexuality have been discarded.

I wish I could be of more help, but this is what sparknotes has to say:Īs the Director and Mustapha Mond explain to the boys how the World State works in an abstract way, the interspliced scenes of Lenina and Bernard show the society in action. I read it perhaps three years ago so I really can't remember.

Brave new world book chapt 3