In this chapter, Huxley features John's discovery of the activities that come closest to imagination and poetry in the world of Fordian London — taking soma and going to the feelies.
Huxley has introduced the effects of soma very early in the novel, and so the reader is not surprised to find Linda on a more or less perpetual soma holiday now that the drug is available to her once more. Soma, however, is new to John, and his worry about the drug shortening his mother's life gives Huxley the opportunity to expand on soma once again. In explaining what he regards as soma's benefits, Dr. Shaw uses the word "eternity" — a concept John recognizes from Shakespeare's poetry. The moment represents a rare connection for the displaced character.
The chapter also offers a detailed description of the feelies, the popular entertainment that combines the senses of smell and touch in a movie format. Bernard, the reader recalls, disdained the feelies as beneath his intellectual dignity. Huxley's presentation of John's experience, however, makes clear the strengths and weaknesses of the form, which Mustapha Mond describes in Chapter 16 as "practically nothing but pure sensation."
As the chapter reveals, the feelies exist simply to soothe and titillate the senses, while leaving the mind (or, rather, one's conditioning) untouched. The story is pornographic, but conservative, containing nothing at all to introduce doubts into a viewer's sense of social order.
