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.
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