How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Part.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Benito stared after him. "What can be the matter with the fellow?" he wondered, and, shaking his head, decided that the story about the alcohol having been put into the poor chap's blood-surrogate must be true. "Touched his brain, I suppose."
He put away the soma bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone chewing-gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the hangars, ruminating. (4.1.27-8)
Check out this contrast; Benito surmises that Bernard's deficiencies are the result of alcohol, but at the same time he freely indulges in his own drugs (soma and sex-hormone chewing-gum).
Quote #5
Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey, Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world—the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! "Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted…" But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted… They were inside, here and now-safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their saxophones and the Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues, they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate.
[…]
Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry's room on the twenty-eighth floor. (5.1.19-22)
Soma is really just another form of restriction and imprisonment in Brave New World.
Quote #6
Again twelve stanzas. By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Bernard felt himself a little melted (5.2.17)
Bernard feels himself "a little melted" from the soma, but he still remains remarkably lucid during his Solidarity Service. Why is this? Does it mean that soma's effects are at least partly imagined?