She tried to cry out-- but no sound came; only terror of her staring eyes revealed what she was suffering. Her hands went to her throat, then clawed at the air-- the air she could no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had ceased to exist.I believe we have reached the climax of the story, good people! All the emotions building up inside of John now have a reason to just spill over. I get the feeling he is going to do something crazy now.
Also, John's realization of a false utopia occurs in this fourteenth chapter.
. . . that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose memory, as of heaven, a paradise of goodness and loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by contact with the reality of this real London, these actual civilized men and women (pg. 201).The true London is nothing like John expected. Linda, with her Beta-Minus conditioning, only knew to love the city and told him of the wonderful things she knew. She resented the Reservation; John, on the other hand, grew up on the Reservation and knew only of the city what his mother told him. All that technology must have sounded fantastic and other worldly to him, but he wasn't properly prepared. He had no idea what the people were like, and that severely affected how he took to the city. The people have the emotional range of a teaspoon; their training keeps them from thinking the way he does. This isolates him, and that isolation leads to more thinking. That thinking leads to more "radical" ideas, and those ideas lead to more isolation. It's a continuous downward spiral that I'm sure will lead him to do something drastic to try to get the people to understand that there is something more than their little world.
Until next time,
Alysse
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