Rhetorical Questions

" 'Did you ever feel,' he asked, 'as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out?' " ( page 69)

I realize the quote on the top of this page is not rhetorical, but it conveys the way I believe Bernard and Helmholtz often feel in their backward world. They are so unusual compared to the robotic people that surround them on an everyday basis. However, numerous rhetorical questions are in fact used, including: "What is there more important to say?", "Can you make works really piercing...when you're writing about that sort of thing?", and "can you say something about nothing?". Helmholtz, being an Emotional Engineer, should be able to sit patients down, ask them how things make them feel, and then answer these unanswered questions.  I think he, just like Bernard, is realizing that he is different from the other people in the community, but he doesn't know why. I think he asks all of these questions to Bernard hoping that someone else as individual and independent as himself will be able to give an answer. The rhetorical questions used in chapter 4 of Brave New World made me realize that not everyone in the community is subject to strictly what the Controllers have in mind. Through these questions, I think Bernard begins to realize that his feeling of solitude and mental excess is not as strange as he previously thought.