Then John embarrasses the nurse by using the term mother when he had asks her to take him to his mother, Linda. In order to avoid further embarrassment, she quickly takes him to Linda. He is allowed to see Linda in her bed, but she is in a state of semi-consciousness. He holds her hand and tries to speak to her but, she only mentions the name of one of her lovers from the Reservation. John is angry that she does not realize he is there.
He tries to remember the good times they had together; her teaching him to read, them talking together, her version of the Other Place, her version which is so different than the reality of London.
All at once the ward is, to John's mind, invaded by a set of 20 twins in khaki. They are there to be death-conditioned. These twins swarm around Linda's bed because she looks so different from the other patients. This is because the other patients look as though they are young girls, Linda on the other hand is fat, with wrinkled skin. One of the children pops out from under the bed and stares closely into Linda's face.
John takes the child by the collar and lifts him away from Linda. He then hits the twin in the ears for his intrusion into Linda's space. The Head Nurse threatens to throw John out if he continues to behave in this manner. The Head Nurse cannot understand John's behavior. And then he remembers this world—the civilized world — as Linda used to describe it to him, as a "beautiful, beautiful Other Place […], a paradise of goodness and loveliness.
It remains a place "whole and intact, undefiled. Of course, the kids are all in shock because they've never seen anyone like Linda before. She's overweight and old. John grabs one particularly disgusted child and gives him a good sock. The nurse rushes in. She orders John to 1 stop hitting the children and 2 stop being such a bother, and then she leaves with the children and gets them playing hunt-the-zipper.
Linda starts to wake, and John tries to return to his pleasant memories. Their soma rations are quickly restored. The police ask Helmholtz and John to come quietly. Bernard tries to slip out the door unobserved, but he is caught before he can escape. The dramatic riot incited by John is the climax of the novel.
He insists on seeing Lenina as a pure, virginal woman, possessed of complete sexual modesty. He struggles with the physical side of sexuality to the point that he wants to repress it entirely.
When Lenina makes a pass at him, he calls her a whore for breaking the rules of a moral code she is not even aware of. It is significant that when he locks himself away from Lenina, he chooses to read Othello , a play about the doomed relationship between a black African man and a white Venetian woman.
Like John, Othello veers between the extremes of perceiving his beloved as a chaste statue and as a whore. It is this misperception that leads Othello to slaughter his wife, not an incompatibility between their two cultures.
Any tolerance he might once have felt for the practices and people of the World State disappears. He thinks of the Bokanovsky twins as maggots who defile his grieving process. Unfortunately for John, his mother is no help. He sees himself reflected in their laughter as a curious, comedic spectacle, not as a human being.
Worse yet is the fact that he considers Helmholtz a friend with whom he can discuss his feelings for Lenina. The end result of all these separate episodes is that John acknowledges that he, as an individual, cannot exist within World State society. John would rather see the truth and real human relationships—even painful ones—than the near-slavery of soma. Linda and the Deltas use soma to escape all pain and responsibility.
The vast majority of World State citizens remain childlike their whole lives through the use of conditioning, social reinforcement, and soma.
Helmholtz throws himself into the fray when he and Bernard arrive at the hospital, but Bernard hesitates. To John, the look seems to reproach him; in fact, he believes that he has killed her. John's guilt about his mother's death will re-emerge in later chapters, finally driving him to violence and isolation — an end that Huxley hints at in the conclusion of this chapter, when John pushes away a curious child roughly enough to force him to the floor.
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