A Clockwork Orange
- Yael Ochoa
- Jun 10, 2020
- 2 min read
by Anthony Burgess
In a word: horrorshow
In a sentence: Alex is forced to come of age in a battle between good and lack of choice.
Synopsis: Vicious young hoodlum Alex and his gang of thugs ravage their town for sport until Alex is sold out to the police. A Clockwork Orange asks the question 'should society allow evil people free will?' and answers it through the slang saturated style of youth.
Reactions: This was my third reading of A Clockwork Orange. The first, it took me several chapters to get the hang of nadsat, so I read it through a second time so I could claim a full understanding of the novel.
The fact that Lolita is my favorite novel should speak to my tolerance for repulsive subject matter, and A Clockwork Orange certainly takes the cake, but I found it much more palatable during this reading as I knew what to expect. It should also be noted that after the Stanley Kubrick's adaptation hit cinemas, Burgess stated that the novel was too easily read as a celebration of violence and declared it his least favorite of his written works. It is for these reasons that in my most recent reading of A Clockwork Orange I enjoyed it the most, being able to push the gore to the side and focus instead on its deeper messages.
This novel poses serious questions of morality and free will. In the mode of a scientific study, Alex lives a chaotic gory life of freedom and then is forced to relive those events after his behavior modification therapy forces him to be 'good,' sorting the novel's three parts into an ABA form quite similar to the symphonies and sonatas that Alex holds so dear. However, through this process Alex feels neither remorse for his crimes nor any genuine compassion, and his evolution is thus a paradoxically stagnant one. This enforces the essential nature of free will during personal growth and negates any good deeds he may have committed while suffering the effects of his forced moral transformation.
Read if: you can stomach a fair bit of violence for the sake of an interesting moral lesson.
Comments