“Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?” (Burgess 93). The book Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is composed almost entirely of rape, murder, and evil. The book follows a young teen by the name Alex, who by nature, falls into criminal activity wherever he goes since “to devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.” (Burgess 152). After being convicted of murder, he is subject to a government rehab experiment. He loses his ability to make decisions but stops hurting the people around him. Burgess gained inspiration for the book after visiting the soviet union in 1961. During his visit, he was appalled by the extent to which communism controlled the citizens' lives, and decided to base his dystopian future in Clockwork Orange off of communism. The main theme of his book and almost all of his others center around the idea of choice and evil. “Born a Catholic in Protestant England, Burgess believed that although people are born …show more content…
It used one evil to emphasize the greatness of another, “The author's portrayal of the brutal, egocentric Alex, who is transformed through the novel from perpetrator to victim of an even greater evil, a supposedly benevolent government program, is brilliantly plotted and illustrated through a series of encounters with his friends, his parents, and his probation officer” (D'Ammassa). The flow of the story throughout the book uses our hatred for Alex as a preface to the greater evil that follows, allowing the reader to fully understand the extremeness of the latter evil. Burgess not only uses small interactions and reactions as proof of his theme but the entire book as one story to make a single point. Burgess uses storytelling and fantasy to warn his readers and the world of the dangers within the human society and to warning against a possible