The Big Human Attribute

I really adored this book and emerged from it with massive respect for Anthony Burgess as both a writer and a philosopher. By following the life of Alex, an explicitly evil young man who chooses to live the way he does as an exercise of his God-given free will, Burgess is able to ask the reader big questions pertaining to the true essence of morality and the constituents of human nature, ultimately leading the reader to begin to analyze their own exercise of free will. Not many novels can cause the reader to apply the novel’s themes to their own lives resulting in soul-shaking discoveries and realizations that have the capacity to change an individual’s entire perspective on life, let alone accomplish that all while narrating in a mad Russo-Anglo slang completely invented by the author.

            What I really enjoyed about A Clockwork Orange, aside from its completely unique, fresh, and unconventional approach to the same basic, over-arching situation presented in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or A Brave New World, was Burgess’s capacity to create such a dynamic character. Alex is an evil thug, and yet we love him, we relate to him, and we find ourselves rooting for him. He is the embodiment of “duality is the ultimate reality,” a term coined by Burgess himself. Also, being able to read and understand nadsat, essentially a different language, allowed the reader to identify with Alex on a very intimate level which provided one the most unique and remarkable reading experiences I have known.

“The freedom to choose is the big human attribute”

--Anthony Burgess

Could Winston be Alex's Big Brother?

I was told by a friend who had read the book before that A Clockwork Orange was like George Orwell’s 1984 on ketamine. It turned out to be a fairly accurate description. While the novels differ in many respects, the setting of a not-too-distant dystopian future and the main character becoming incarcerated for a crime and subsequently being robbed of all free will and self-determination by a dehumanizing, totalitarian government were elements both novels shared. Winston and Alex both share a quality of innocence and seem to possess a moral compass that enables them to navigate the murky waters of their societies—even though they take completely opposite routes.

This novel was written during the 1960s and the Cold War, which was beset by anxiety over the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two great superpowers that emerged from the ashes of World War II. The fact that Burgess incorporates Russian and English into his invented language of nadsat suggests that American capitalist democracy and Russian communism are one in the same. Also, that fact that Burgess satirizes the prevalent apathy characteristic of post-war England through his descriptions of Alex’s parents underscores Burgess’s (and Alex’s) disdain for impartiality and apathy because they equate them with inhumanity.

Syntactics (syntax tactics)

• ·          “There it was then, the bass strings like govoreeting away from under my bed at the rest of the orchestra, and then the male human goloss coming and telling them all to be joyful, and then the lovely blissful tune all about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven, and then I felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two young ptitsas” (50-51).

Using such a long, run-on sentence separated evenly by commas and integrated with a anaphora gives the sentence—which describes Beethoven’s Ode To Joy—the quality of being music-like itself in the way that it flows and builds up on itself. In the same fashion Ode To Joy seems to “impact” the listener, the subject of this sentence does not “impact” the reader until the end thus emphasizing what that particular part of the sentence is saying: Alex began raping the two young girls. But the fact that Alex’s raping of the girls is set to such a song lends it a certain, dare I say, glorious quality. However, it is not so much the raping that is glorious, but the fact that Alex had the freedom to choose to do this completely immoral thing, because without the option of choosing to be evil, being good is a meaningless gesture and life itself becomes essentially worthless.

• ·         “All this time, O thanks to worldcasts on the gloopy TV and, more, lewdies’ night-fear through lack of night-police, dead lay the street” (65).

Again we can observe this sentence as periodic, but the syntactical device that is significant in this sentence is the inverted word order in the last clause which serves to emphasize the “dead” in “dead lay the street.” This can be interpreted as foreshadowing for the heinous acts Alex and his droogs are about to commit which ultimately result in F. Alexander’s wife’s death.

• ·         “…and hot after this picture the sickness and dryness and pains were rushing to overtake…” (139).

By replacing commas with the conjunction “and,” Burgess creates a polysyndeton which lends a seemingly never-ending feature to the negative nouns within it that buttress their negativity and amplify it out into apparent eternity.

• ·         “What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?” (106).

Even though the chaplain is attempting to articulate to Alex the significance of God-given free will, these rhetorical questions seemed equally aimed at the reader from Burgess. These questions represent the foremost thematic concept of the novel: that good acts and leading a “good” life essentially hold no value or meaning when they are performed due to lack of free will. By packaging the novel’s entire message into these couple of rhetorical questions, Burgess attempts to coax the readers to deeply ponder and conclude for themselves the significance of free will and the ability to choose a path of morality or immorality.

Some bezoomy solvos to pony

One cannot discuss the diction of A Clockwork Orange without addressing the harsh, crudely original slang derived from Russian and Cockney English that Anthony Burgess innovates to narrate the entire novel. Burgess does not hesitate and immediately begins the novel with his invented vocabulary called nadsat. As a reader, this unprecedented approach is very disorienting at first, which is surely what Burgess intended. However, by the beginning of the second chapter, the meanings of several words can be inferred, and as the reader begins to draw connections to nadsat from their own brand of slang, the diction begins to flow in an effortless, conversation-type fashion. However, this understanding of nadsat enables the reader to identify in Alex’s terms which now brings with it the ability to comprehend the horrible and unspeakable crimes that Alex and his droogs commit. This is a clever technique because Burgess forces the reader to develop a sort of connection and sympathy with Alex. “In some sense, then, nadsat is a form of brainwashing—as we develop this new vocabulary, it subtly changes the ways we think about things. Nadsat shows the subtle, subliminal ways that language can control others. As the popular idiom of the teenager, nadsat seems to enter the collective consciousness on a subcultural level, a notion that hints at an undercurrent of burgeoning repression” (SparkNotes Editors).

Nadsat brings with it its own sort of omnipotent undertone that affects essentially every word in the novel. No matter what tone Alex is narrating in—gleeful, pensive, outraged—the use of nadsat flavors it with a unique undertone of gall and enmity which subtly insinuate Alex’s underlying hasty and puerile traits that he allows to guide him along his path of wickedness. It is a conscious moral decision that he makes just as he chooses to speak using the stark nadsat.

Works Cited:

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on A Clockwork Orange.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2005. Web. 06 Mar. 2011.

Rhetorical Strategies like boom boom boom boom

A Clockwork Orange does not flaunt an especially vast repertoire of rhetorical strategies. Sure, the reader can observe a sprinkling of metaphor or imagery here and there, but for the most part, Burgess uses mostly similes and especially repeating onomatopoeias.

The use of similes is the dominant tool for illustrating comparisons in the novel. The similes are most frequently used to describe people and sometimes items. Doing so not only puts whatever is being described into perspective for the reader, but also lends the reader insight to better understand the significance of that person or item. While Alex and his droogs are stabbing people in what appears to be a gang fight, Alex remarks that “the stars stabbing away as it might be knives anxious to join in the dratsing” (19). Comparing the stars to himself and his droogs in a sort of personifying manner reveals an embrace of the night as the time when they not only commit their heinous crimes, but also because “darkness represents the privacy and solitude necessary for an individual will to exist and make choices freely” (SparkNotes Editors) which is the pivotal theme in the novel. This deeper insight provided by a simile can again be observed when Alex describes one of Dr. Brodsky’s colleges during one of his “treatments”: “Then one very thin starry professor type chelloveck stood up, his neck like all cables carrying like power from his gulliver to his plot…” (141). This description resonates a cold, robotic quality that is adhered to this character and exhibits Burgess’s and Alex’s attitude toward the State, which is one of bitter, brooding resentment towards an unforgiving, dehumanizing machine.

Burgess’s inundation of repeating onomatopoeias in Alex’s narration and dialogue commonly serve to create a rushed and frantic atmosphere, and to subtly characterize Alex as immature. One of countless of examples can be observed when Alex is describing a dream he had in Part One, Chapter 4: “…each time I got a real horrorshow tolchock with this whip there was like a very loud electric bell ringringringring, and this bell was like a sort of pain too. Then I woke up real skorry, my heart going bap bap bap, and of course there was really a bell going brrrrr, and it was our front-door bell” (41). They way Alex explains his dream is akin to that of a young child. While using “ringringringring” or “brrrrr” to describe the sound of a bell ringing rather than using an actual word such as “chime,” or “tintinnabulate” does appeal to the reader’s sense of sound a bit more by supplying a more precise and realistic portrayal, it serves to expose the narrator’s immaturity because he might not know such words to describe the ringing of a bell. Again when attempting to narrate about his “Reclamation Treatment” experience, Alex says “the throb and like crash crash crash crash in [his] gulliver and the wanting to sick and the terrible dry rasping thirstiness in [his] rot, all were worse than yesterday,” he again demonstrates his inability to articulate so he resorts to trying to recreate the sound in order to compensate for his lack knowledge of a sufficient describing word. Exposing Alex’s immaturity through the utilization of these repeated onomatopoeias reveals how his pleasure-seeking and violent acts associate with being immature, almost as if they were a natural part of growing up and life itself.

Works Cited:

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on A Clockwork Orange.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2005. Web. 07 Mar. 2011.