A Clockwork Orange
It tells the dystopian story of a teenage boy Alex, his violent and unlawful lifestyle, the effort of the state to reform him and henceforth the consequences.
The novel also contains an experiment in language: Burgess creates a new speech that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future.
Plot summary
Part 1: Alex's world
Alex, a young teenager living in a socialistic near-future England, leads his gang on nightly orgies of random, opportunistic violence. Alex's friends ("droogs" in the novel's Anglo-Russified slang) are Dim, a slow-witted bruiser who is the gang's muscle, Georgie and Pete.
Alex, quick-witted and often disconcertingly funny, is clearly the smartest of the group and even somewhat cultured. This is a double-edged virtue, however, since Alex chiefly uses the most beautiful orchestral music to prime himself up for mayhem.
The novel opens with the thugs hunkered down in their favorite hangout, the Korova Milkbar, where they drink drugged milk and hype themselves for the night's mayhem.
They beat up a scholar walking home from the library, stomp a panhandling derelict, scuffle with a rival gang led by Billyboy, rob a newsstand and leave its owners unconscious, steal a car and then go joyriding in the countryside. In the novel's most harrowing sequence, the droogs force their way into an isolated cottage and maul the young couple living there, beating the husband to a pulp before they take turns raping his wife.
After ditching the car, the droogs head back to the Korova, where it becomes clear that Dim and Georgie are restive under Alex's domination of the gang. Alex goes home to his dreary flat and plays thunderously loud classical music while bringing himself to climax with fantasies of even more orgiastic violence.
Alex skips school the next morning and is visited by P.R.
Deltoid, "(his) post-corrective advisor," assigned to him after unspecified past acts of juvenile delinquency. While visiting his favorite record store, Alex picks up a pair of young teenaged girls who are also playing hooky, buys them lunch, then takes them back to his parents' flat, where he gets them drunk and, after dosing himself with music and an unspecified drug, repeatedly rapes them.
(Stanley Kubrick's film turns this into a consensual orgy -- one of several changes that serve to make the filmic Alex less appalling than the literary one.) The girls leave, threatening to call the police, as Alex falls asleep.
Alex wakes up later and has a revealing chat with his ineffectual parents, who are suspicious about his claims about having a night job but too intimidated to press the issue. Arriving late to meet with the droogs, who have already pumped themselves up with "the old knifey moloko" (i.e., doped milk), Alex is at a disadvantage.
Georgie challenges Alex for leadership of the gang, demanding that they pull a "mansized" job by robbing a wealthy old woman who lives alone with her cats. Alex quells the rebellion by slashing Dim and Georgie in a knife fight, then in a show of generosity takes them to a bar for some fortifying drinks.
Georgie and Dim are ready to call it a night, but Alex bullies them into proceeding with the burglary. Alex enters through a second-floor window and, after a farcical struggle, knocks the old woman unconscious.
When he tries to flee, Dim gets the drop on him and the droogs leave Alex incapacitated in the doorway as they run off. Alex learns of his ex-droog Georgie's death by an intended victim during a botched robbery.
The technique itself is a form of aversion therapy, in which Alex is given a drug that induces extreme nausea while being forced to watch graphically violent films for two weeks. Strapped into a seat before a large screen, Alex is forced to watch an unrelenting series of violent acts.
During the sessions, Alex begins to realize that not only the violent acts but the music on the soundtrack is triggering his nausea attacks. (Kubrick's film version, curiously, narrows this down so that only Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has this effect.) Alex pleads with the supervising doctors to remove the music, crying that it is a sin to take away his love of music, but they refuse, saying that it is for his own good and that the music may be the "punishment element." By the end of the treatment, Alex is unable to listen to any classical music -- let alone the Ninth Symphony by his beloved "Ludwig van" -- without incapacitating nausea and distress.
A few weeks later, Alex is presented to an audience of prison and government officials as a successfully rehabilitated inmate and potential member of society.
Alex's conditioning makes him unable to defend himself against a pummeling bully (who forces Alex to lick his boots) and cripples him with nausea when the sight of a scantily clad woman arouses his predatory sexual impulses. The prison chaplain rises to denounce the treatment and accuses the state of stripping Alex of the ability to choose good over evil.
He finds himself powerless to defend himself against them, as the Ludovico treatment leaves him ill when he attempts violence. However, he is unpleasantly surprised by the discovery that his parents have rented out his room to a lodger named Joe, essentially "replacing" their son.
With no place to go, stripped of the ability to fight back, Alex despondently wanders London. He stops at the Korova Milk Bar and drinks euphoria-inducing milk, something he has never done before, and then to the music store for some classical music.
Alex decides to commit suicide, but is unable to because the technique prevents him from committing any act of violence, including against himself. He wanders into the public library, only to be quickly recognised by the elderly librarian whom he had beaten up with his droogs in chapter one.
The police - called by the librarian - turn out to be his old ex-'droog' Dim, and old arch-enemy Billy Boy. Taking advantage of their positions, they take Alex to the town's edge, beat him and leave him for dead.
Alex wanders in a daze through the countryside until he collapses at the door of an isolated cottage.
Too late he realizes this is the home he and his droogs invaded at the start of the book. He is taken in by Fred Alexander, the husband of the woman the droogs gang-raped; Mr.
Alexander doesn't recognize Alex because the droogs were wearing masks during the assault. Alexander died of the injuries inflicted during the gang-rape, and her husband has decided to continue "where her fragrant memory persists" despite the horrid memories.
Alexander's care, and the writer begins to suspect they have met before. Driven to insanity by the music, Alex jumps from his bedroom window in an attempt to end his life.
Alex wakes up in a hospital, where he learns that the government, trying to reverse the bad publicity it incurred in the wake of Alex's suicide attempt, has reversed the effects of the Ludovico treatment.
Alexander has been incarcerated in a mental institution, "for his own protection, and for yours," Alex is told. In return for agreeing to play ball with the powers that be, Alex is promised a cushy job at high salary.
After watching them beat an innocent stranger walking home with a newspaper, he begins to feel bored with his life of violence. He abandons the gang then has a chance encounter with Pete, an old droog who has reformed and married.
Alex begins contemplating giving up crime himself to become a productive member of society and start a family of his own, while reflecting on the notion that his own children will be just as destructive-- if not more so-- than he himself.
Characters
Alex: The novel's anti-hero and leader among his droogs. He is killed while breaking into a house during Alex's term in prison.
Pete: The more rational and least violent of the gang.
Indeed, when Alex is arrested for murdering an old woman, and then ferociously beaten by several police officers, Deltoid simply spits on him.
The Prison Chaplain (also called the 'prison charlie,' a take on Charlie Chaplin) The character who first questions whether or not forced goodness is really better than chosen wickedness. The only character who is truly concerned about Alex's welfare; he is not taken seriously by Alex, though.
The Governor: The man who decides to let Alex "choose" to be the first reformed by the Ludovico Technique.
Dr.
He seems much more passive than Brodsky, and says considerably less.
F. He was left deeply scarred by these events, and after he encountered Alex one year on, used him as a guinea pig in a sadistic experiment intended to prove the inefficiency of the Ludovico Technique.
Otto Skadelig: a fictional Danish composer.
The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986. In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he'd first brought the book to an American publisher, he'd been told that U.S. audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways and resolves to turn his life around (a slow-ripening but classic moment of metanoia; the moment at which one's protagonist realizes that everything he thought he knew, was wrong).
At the American publisher's insistence, Burgess allowed their editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the U.S.
version, so that the tale would end on a note of bleak despair, with young Alex succumbing to his darker nature; an ending which the publisher insisted would be 'more realistic' and appealing to a U.S. The film adaptation, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is based on this "badly flawed" (Burgess' words, ibid.) American edition of the book.
Kubrick claimed that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, but that he certainly had never given any serious consideration to using it.
Analysis
Title
Burgess wrote that the title was a reference to an old Cockney expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange".¹ Due to his time serving in the British Colonial Office in Malaysia, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used punningly to refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) human (orang, Malay for "man").
Burgess wrote in introduction to the 1986 edition, titled A Clockwork Orange Resucked, that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil; or the almighty state."
In his essay "Clockwork Oranges"², Burgess asserts that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". The protagonist, Alex, never justifies his actions in the narration, giving a sense that he is somewhat sincere; a narrator who, as unlikeable as he may attempt to seem, evokes pity from the reader through the telling of his unending suffering, and later through his realisation that the cycle will never end.
Alex's perspective is effective in that the way that he describes events is easy to relate to, even if the situations themselves are not. It is a mix of modified Slavic words, Polari, Cockney rhyming slang, derived Russian (like "baboochka"), and words invented by Burgess himself.