It seemed to me that it was a hint about who John really is.

I’m not saying he is John Locke the philosopher. Just that perhaps based on that real world person, and his parents giving John that name. Maybe his fate is diretly related to something that philosopher was well known for.

Here is a Wiki segment that best sums up what the actual John Locke was know for. See anything familiar in it?

—Locke’s theory of mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and “the self”, figuring prominently in the later works of philosophers such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of “consciousness”. He also postulated that the mind was a “blank slate” or “tabula rasa”; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas.—