Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
"...it was not to sing and enjoy himself that he had come here. It was to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life; it was to be purified and made good; it was actively to make amends," (Huxley, 247).
What do you do when everything in your world has been destroyed by powers far outside your control? Each individual has their own ways of dealing with grief and insanity. For those in civilized society it's simple: take a soma holiday, but for John, the baseness of this response disgusts him. He instead returns to the customs that he knows: to self purify through suffering and self-denial. Because these concepts are so foreign to the civilized people, they again claim him as a novelty and send media crews to catch footage of the savage harming himself in strange ritual that he can't explain. In the end, it becomes too much and John can no longer live with himself in the knowledge that he has been a part of the society and can't escape from it.
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