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A Clockwork Orange Research Paper

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Nothing Clockwork About This Orange The 1960s in Europe was a time focused on its youth. The parents of the 1960s generation had spent their young adult and teen years fighting against the Axis in World War II and wanted their kids to enjoy being young. This generation spent time making a name for themselves by reinventing music, shocking fashion norms, and causing trouble in their gangs. Anthony Burgess was interested by this generation of young adults and focused his chef d'oeuvre, A Clockwork Orange, on a shocking, violent gang of teens. Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was influenced by his wife's assault, his trips to the Soviet Union, and his fascination of the youth subculture. The influences on A Clockwork Orange began before Burgess …show more content…

In one of his classrooms in 1959, Burgess collapsed and was then misdiagnosed with a brain tumor that was predicted to kill him within a year. Burgess then began working on numerous novels including A Clockwork Orange. In 1961 he took his first of many trips to Leningrad which was a part of the Soviet Union at the time. During his trip, Burgess was “appalled at the degree to which the communist state controlled people's lives” (“A Clockwork Orange” 1), this led to the idea of free will being a major theme in his most famous novel. When Alex goes to jail, he is brainwashed into thinking the way the government wants him to think, giving him no control over his own mind which is very similar to the amount of control the Soviet Union had over its subjects. Burgess also dabbled in Russian language during his visits, Szeman points out the prevalence of Russian in Alex's made up language, “Burgess's most memorable novel, A Clockwork Orange, cannot be discussed without addressing its language 'nasdat', a combination of Russian, English, and slang...” (Szeman 295). An example of Russian in the novel is what Alex calls his gang, droogs, which is derived from the Russian word “drugi” meaning friends in

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Colloquialisms are often used in literature to give their character more lifelike qualities. If the character speaks with their own slang it gives the character more defining qualities and makes them more memorable. Burgess uses colloquialisms to the fullest with his character Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Alex has his own slang that he uses throughout the entire book, which makes him an extremely different and memorable character. Alex uses his slang very early in the book, on page two Alex states, "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim..."(Burgess 1.1.2).

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A Clockwork Orange, written by Anthony Burgess, deals with the essence of humanity and morality. Being difficult topics to grapple with, many turn to a religious perspective to inform their beliefs on these subjects. Burgess himself is a strongly Catholic individual and this ideology shows through in the ideas presented by A Clockwork Orange. The book contains a number of allusions to the Bible, Jesus and God’s intentions for humanity. These religious references build upon each other to develop Burgess’ notion that God created humans with free will, and how this leaves humankind flawed and prone to evil tendences.

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INTRODUCTION “What’s it going to be then, eh?” It is hard to improve upon Anthony Burgess’ classic opening line to his masterpiece. With this bold, taunting question, A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, 15-year old Alex, opens the door for our descent into a terrifyingly grim world where ultra-violence and apathy pervade a shocking totalitarian society. The book is partly written in a Russian-influenced argot called nadsat which serves to minimize the horror of the violence depicted. It revolves around a devastatingly simple premise; when state authorities seek to reform young criminals like Alex, Burgess asks- what’s the cost?

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Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Clockwork Orange present their protagonists as memorable losers through the use of history, the distinctive language and the chronological structure emphasising contrast. The “protagonist” is the leading character of the story: which is Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The phrase “memorable losers” is a paradox, as losers are often the ones who are forgotten, which is the opposite of the heroes who are remembered. Winston and Alex are both memorable because they dare to challenge social norms that others mindlessly obey, but they are losers because whilst they have courage, they lack the ability to achieve lasting change. Winston is the only one who dares to challenge the totalitarian

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Fifteen year old Alex de Large is the narrator and main protagonist of “A clockwork orange”, who, along with his 'droogs ' (comrades), rampages through a dystopian Britain committing random acts of 'ultraviolence ', brutal rapes, robbery and ultimately murder. Alex 's other great source of intense enjoyment is listening to classical music, and above all the music of Beethoven or 'Ludwig van ' , which seems to heighten his pleasure and intensify his savage and psychopathic impulses. He is a classic anti-hero, and this includes him having a quality of innocence, even at his most depraved. Deceived by his 'droogs ' and arrested for murder, he is then conned by his fellow cons, who lay blame on him for the murder of a new prison inmate. After

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Nadsat, being made up of British slang mixed with Russian vocabulary, suggests influences of communism to the conservative ruling class (Sumner). While nobody outside of the teenage world can understand the meaning of the words themselves, the ideas of opposition and hostility to authority are still conveyed by the language, allowing the gap between generations to widen. Dr. Brodsky even refers to nadsat as “the dialect of the tribe” (Burgess 124), suggesting that the speakers of the language are a separate entity from the rest of civilized society. But this description of a teen “tribe” can also be used to invoke a sense that the teen community is tight knit and familial.

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He argues that the British’s support for social control, meant renouncing the individual alone, and given his propensity towards anarchy, he disapproved of their socialist nature. He denounced the cultural homogeneity of American society, their heedlessness and indifference, and the crooked, nefarious nature of law enforcement. Deemed as his most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange has been regarded considerably influential in areas of literary, visual, and music culture. However, prior to its release there was hesitation on publishing the novel due to worries of being an ‘enormous flop’ (Independent, 2012).

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