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.