The single appealing quality Burgess leaves Alex is his love of classical music, Beethoven in particular. This makes A Clockwork Orange an ethical puzzle. The following questions dazzled my mind as I started thinking about this aspect of the book. Is the love of Beethoven being a kind of cultural badge showing that someone can be civilised? Can this be regarded as having a soul, an intellect? Or that someone deserves to be treated as human because of their aesthetic tastes?
I believe these questions touch upon the aspect of ethics but also the importance of the slang language. Alex’s love for Beethoven balances his narration of the story in the alien-sounding, violence-savouring blend of Russian and English. Since Burgess was responding to youth cultures that both spoke their versions of English and listened exclusively to their varieties of music .
Anthony Burgess said himself; “a Russified version of English was meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography.” , “to tolchock, a chelloveck in the kishkas does not sound as bad as booting a man in the guts” - the idea of the language is to express how Alex feels like a young man. Speaking his language is part of what makes him feel imaginative, creative and liberated. A sense of empowerment is built up in him
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These include psychedelics, lack of any ethical framework, social isolation and raw enjoyment of ‘ultraviolence’ have seeped into the core of Alex, making him a lawless. He is trying to control and handle the world he creates but it overpowers him and being infantile and childish, he is crushed from the dystopian world he created. This suffering is not something he can shut out after that as life continues to go downwards for him. This is one of the main reasons why Alex fails and won’t be able to transform into a normal member of