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A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is a dark look into a frightful future of violence and social control. The story dives deep into such issues as free will, the illusions of reality, the morality of ethics, and many others. Burgess fills this horrific tale with satire, numerous puns, and above all: irony. A Clockwork Orange is comparable to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Burgess presents us with a philosophical message that we may soon find ourselves faced with. A Clockwork Orange is made up of three parts containing 21 chapters, 21 being the official age of human maturity.
It is a stream-of-consciousness novel about, most fundamentally, the freedom of people to choose. It asks readers if personal freedom is a justifiable sacrifice for comfort and social stability. This theme umbrellas many others, including the struggle between the governors and the governed and the age-old struggle between good and evil. A Clockwork Orange also incorporates the themes of youth versus old age and illusion versus reality.
Burgess, both a writer and an established linguist, uses A Clockwork Orange as a vessel for some very mature exploration of languages and literary play-things. Burgess fuses together many different languages in A Clockwork Orange to create Nadsat, the language of the youth. Nadsat is made up mainly of Russian, child speak, and invented and British slang, but it also utilizes Malay, German, French, Arabic, and Gypsy. The word Nadsat comes from the Russian word nadsat, a suffix for the numbers 11 through 19 -- the teenage numbers (Lund). The title A Clockwork Orange is derived from several sources. Used in old London slang, one might say someone is "as queer as a clockwork orange" (Burgess, "Resucked" x).
In Nadsat, "orange" means "man" (which is derived from the Malay word "orang, " meaning "man"), so a clockwork orange would be a man moving without pause or thought, as a clockwork (Lund). Burgess says of the title, "I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness" ("Resucked" x). After the state reforms him, the novel's hero and narrator Alex becomes a clockwork orange, a man working as a machine. Nadsat is the primary language, although not the exclusive one, of A Clockwork Orange. Burgess claims he uses it "to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography. " But he also uses it to create a "literary adventure" ("Resucked" x). The use of Nadsat emphasizes many of the struggles involved with A Clockwork Orange's purpose.
The struggle between the old and the young -- the conservative and the progressive -- is made more sensational by the separation of language. Alex is misunderstood by his parents, the police, and the government philosophically, but also literally, widening the gap between him and the "sane" world. Burgess also manipulates language in A Clockwork Orange in more traditional ways, in the form of literary and linguistic devices. The novel is saturated with irony and dark humor, dotted with repetition, and laced with word play. Irony is used extensively A Clockwork Orange. One of the most repeated and significant examples of irony is in Alex's description of violence.
Prior to his treatment, he refers any form of violence as "beautiful. " After he hits Dim in the face, Alex says Dim is "singing blood to make up for his vulgarity" (Burgess, Clockwork 28). However, Alex refers to things most people regard as beneficial -- education, religion, and rational thought -- as undesirable and grotesque. Everything, then, that should be good, becomes bad, and vice versa. After the state reforms Alex, he begins contemplating his new accidental Judeo-Christian ethics: "And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that very had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek" (Burgess, Clockwork 121). Another very significant bit of irony is in the name of the house that follows Alex throughout the story -- the house that gives A Clockwork Orange its title and most of its major themes, and that ultimately causes Alex's downfall.
The name of this house is Home. When Alex's gang first encounters Home, Alex calls it "a gloomy sort of name" (Burgess, Clockwork 19). Home is a word that carries with it the implication of comfort, safety, stability, and family. When Alex chooses to break into Home, destroy its contents, beat its master, and rape its mistress, he seals his fate.
He does this also when he destroys the manuscript of F. Alexander's A Clockwork Orange while at Home. The irony is that Alex destroys F. Alexander's argument against the very treatment that will later destroy his life. In this, he dooms himself. Other examples of irony can be found scattered throughout the book.
When Alex's gang hears a bum sing to himself, "O dear dear land, I fought for thee/And brought thee peace and victory, " they beat him to near death (Burgess, Clockwork 14). When Alex is undergoing his treatment, the nurses and doctors call the drugs that will destroy Alex's life "vitamins. " The treatment itself is ironic, for in trying to condition Alex to not terrorize men, the state terrorizes Alex. Burgess said, "Juvenile delinquents destroy the State's peace; mature delinquents threaten to destroy the human race" Burgess uses repetition in A Clockwork Orange to give order and consistency to a very chaotic structure and plot. The novel begins with the line "What's it going to be then, eh?" Alex is asking his drugs what the night's activities will be. This same line is repeated twelve times throughout the book, but its meaning constantly mutates. Throughout part one of the book, it retains its original, simple meaning.
In the first chapter of part two, the phrase changes its meaning and its speaker. It becomes preachy and 'What's it going to be then, eh?' said the prison charlie for the third raz. 'Is it going to be in and out and in and out of institutions like this, though more in than out for most of you, or are you going to attend to the Divine Word and realize the punishments that await the unrepentant sinner in the next world, as well as in this? A lot of blasted idiots you are' In the first chapter of part three, Alex asks himself "What's it going to be then, eh?" as he is trying to find meaning and purpose to his life after treatment. In the seventh chapter of part three, Alex asks his new drugs "What's it going to be then, eh?" in reference to what they will do that evening, taking the book full circle back to where it began. Burgess plays with puns throughout A Clockwork Orange in order to add humor to serious situations and dialogues, thus making the book a satire. One of Alex's drugs is named Dim, which is possibly short for Dimitri.
Dim lacks common sense and is used by his friends for his physical strength. When Alex refers to Dim, he calls him "Dim the dim. " When Alex reads an article about the uncivilized behavior of "Modern Youth, " he mocks it by using the words civilized and syphilis ed interchangeably (Burgess, Clockwork 42). Throughout the book, whenever Alex talks about the Minister of the Interior, he calls him "the Minister of the Interior or Inferior. " A Clockwork Orange also contains many metaphors and similes, all of which are quite unorthodox and often used for shock value, and most of which are found in the first (and most violent) part of the book. In chapter one, Burgess uses an extended metaphor to play out the rape of a girl "not more than ten" like a theatrical performance...
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Research essay sample on Clockwork Orange First Chapter
