...A Clockwork Orange The movie starts out with the boys sitting around drinking in the bar. When Alex and his gang leave the bar, they go on a crime spree that involves mugging, robbery, a gang fight, auto theft, breaking and entering, and rape. The boys travel to the countryside with their stolen car, break into a cottage and beat up the man inside before raping his wife while making him watch. They then head back to the Korova, where they fight with each other. Alex, who loves classical music, becomes angry at Dim when Dim ridicules an opera that Alex likes. Alex punches Dim in the face, which encourages the others to turn against their arrogant leader. The next time they go out, they break into an old woman’s house. She calls the police, and before Alex can get away, Dim hits him in the eye with a chain and runs away with the others. The police apprehend Alex and take him to the station, where he later learns that the woman he beat and raped during the earlier robbery has died. Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. At first, prison is difficult for him. The guards are heartless and cruel, and several of the other prisoners want to rape him. After a few years, though, prison life becomes easier. He befriends the prison chaplain, who notices Alex’s interest in the Bible. The chaplain lets Alex read in the chapel while listening to classical music, and Alex pores over the Old Testament, delighting in the sex, drinking, and fighting he finds in its pages. Alex is selected...
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...Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex. I don't know quite how to explain my disgust at Alex (whom Kubrick likes very much, as his visual style reveals and as we shall see in a moment). Alex is the sort of fearsomely strange person we've all run across a few times in our lives -- usually when he and we were children, and he was less inclined to conceal his hobbies. He must have been the kind of kid who tore off the wings of flies and ate ants just because that was so disgusting. He was the kid who always seemed to know more about sex than anyone else, too -- and especially about how dirty it was. Alex has grown up in "A Clockwork Orange," and now he's a sadistic rapist. I realize that calling him a sadistic rapist -- just like that -- is to stereotype poor Alex a little. But Kubrick doesn't give us much more to go on, except that Alex likes Beethoven a lot. Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the same way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music -- to add a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension. Now Alex isn't the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British movies of the early 1960s. No effort is made to explain his inner workings or take apart his society...
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...A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man."Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange is a novel about moral choice and free will. Alex's story shows what happens when an individual's right to choose is robbed for the good of society. The first and last chapters place Alex in more or less the same physical situation but his ability to exercise free will leads him to diametrically opposite choicesgood versus evil. The phrase, "what's it going to be then, eh?," echoes throughout the book; only at the end of the novel is the moral metamorphosis complete and Alex is finally able to answer the question, and by doing so affirms his freedom of choice. The capacity to choose freely is the attribute that distinguishes humans from robots; thus the possibility of true and heartfelt redemption remains open even to the most hardened criminal. A Clockwork Orange is a parable that reflects the Christian concept of sin followed by redemption. Alex's final and free choice of the good, by leaving behind the violence he had embraced in his youth, brings him to a higher moral level than the forced docility of his conditioning, which severed his ability to choose and grow up. The question, "what's it going to be then, eh," is asked at the beginning of each section of the novel. In the first and third part it is asked by Alex, but in the second part it is asked by the prison chaplain. The answer does not come until the end of the novel when Alex grows up and exercises his ability to choose...
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...The ability to choose between good and evil is something that we never really think about too often, or in any real detail. Even so; this decision that comes naturally to most, is something everyone must make throughout their life in order to guide their actions and control their future. This ability to choose, no matter what that choice may be or the outcome of that choice, displays a person’s power as an individual. Any attempts to control or influence that choice will, in turn, govern one's free will and enslave them. In the novel A Clockwork Orange, the author Anthony Burgess uses symbolism through imagery, the characterization of Alex, and a first person narrative point of view to show that without the ability to choose between good or evil, one becomes a slave. Symbolism through imagery explains how Alex's ability to choose between good and evil, is his ascendancy over the weak and innocent. The first of these symbols is the music that he loves to listen to. Classical music is the only thing that Alex's has ever truly cared for. The music represents an element of his choice and free will. When his ability to make choices is taken away from him, in an attempt to make him better, he is unintentionally forced to lose his passion for music, by which he exclaims, "And all the time the music got more and more gromky, like it was all a deliberate torture, O my brothers“. This music that once represented his freedom to choose is gone now, and he has been left without any reason...
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...A Clockwork Orange abandons normal 'language' (which Modernists believed couldn't always convey meaning anyway) and is written in 'Nadsat' (which means teenager). It is a slang that is spoken by the teenagers at the time. Burgess uses approximately two-hundred and fifty 'nadsat' words (most of which have Russian roots) to convey his story. This gives the reader a sense of intimacy with Alex and his 'droogs' (friends) due to the fact that the adults in the novel can't understand what they are govoreeting (saying). There is also a disruption of the linear flow of narrative aside from this private language; Alex ('Our Humble Narrator') tells the story in a remembering type sequence, but often interjects with thoughts or questions posed directly at the reader. Aside from the strange language that is found on the pages of this novel, one of the most obvious modernistic features is Burgess's ability to shock. There are many different scenes that are quite disturbing and violent. Alex's propensity to rape young girls (ten years old), and his absolute joy in the sight of blood and pain. ' ...while I ripped away at this and that and the other...and real good horrorshow [good] groodies [breasts] they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies [eyes], O my brothers, while I untrussed [undresses] and got ready for the plunge. Plunging I could slooshy [hear] the cries of agony' ( Burgess 23). This ties in with the fact that, as readers, we tend to follow the actions of Alex and his droogs...
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...Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University HUMN 330 Spring 2016 Human Nature and Ethics Moral Issues in Film: A Clockwork Orange By Brett Nims Summary A Clockwork Orange is a film about a young adult man, Alex DeLarge. Alex leads a gang of other young adult men in London. The gang goes around the city and commits terrible acts of violence and sexual crimes with no remorse. Alex and his gang of droogs attack an old homeless man, drive dangerously through the country side, and attack an old man and his wife at their home. One night, Alex and his gang break into a woman’s house and he attacks her with a statue. He tries to flee the scene once he hears the police, but his gang turns on him and knocks him unconscious. Alex is convicted of murdering the old lady and is sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment. While imprisoned, Alex says he doesn’t want to be evil anymore and wants to be changed into a good person. He is selected to be a participant in a new experiment to treat him of his bad behavior. Alex is strapped into a chair and forced to watch movies that depict violence and sexual assault. While he is watching the movies he is given a drug to make him nauseous and sick. Once the doctors prove that the treatment has worked on Alex, he is released to be a free man. Alex is beaten by police officers who use to be a part of his old gang. He manages to escape and finds his way to the house of the old man and woman he assaulted from before. The old man finally realizes...
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...Does goodness really come from within or is it possible for one to change their evil ways? Issues such as the battle between good and evil are presented in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick classic film, A Clockwork Orange. If you are easily intrigued by the sight of violence and sounds of Beethoven then this is the film for you. Stanley Kubrick’s complex mind pulls an idea together that will leave you thinking for days. Aside from the inappropriate and disastrous story, it is an enjoyable and intriguing story for any audience member over the age of eighteen. Containing images of a rather violent and obscene nature, the film’s unique portrayal of a London dystopia becomes the backdrop of the story and the exploitation of the issues between the government...
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...A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, written in 1962, is a shocking view of dystopian life featuring a subculture of extreme youth violence. Set in a near future English society, the novel may is often seen in part as an attack on communism (a prevalent issue of the time), given the novel’s extremely negative portrayal of a government that seeks to solve social problems by removing freedom of choice. The novel is comprised of the first-person account of a juvenile delinquent named Alex who, in place of jail-time, voluntarily undergoes state-supported psychological rehabilitation for his evil behavior that will brainwash him into being physically sick if he even thinks about committing a crime. “You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to...
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...Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is a post-apocalyptic tale warning against the dangers of totalitarian government. Combining recent psychological revolutions involving Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning and the dystopian genre, the novel presents the idea that change and the capacity to make conscious decisions is indicative of an individual’s sense of humanity. Burgess originally constructed the novel to be separated into twenty-one chapters, with seven chapters each being split up into three parts. When releasing the novel in America, however, the publishers opted to omit the last chapter even though those in other countries left the novel as is. The primary question left resonating with several readers is whether or not this last chapter is necessary in providing the novel with a wholesome conclusion....
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...His farther is a manufactorer. Working class. What happens?: On page 149 P.R Deltoid visits Alex, P.R Deltoid is his Post-Corrective Adviser. Alex needs to behave well, or else he will be sent to prison. Alex has been in a fight, and it turns out that someone was hurt. Think about it this way - If an adult is involved, it must have been serious. On page 151, P.R Deltoid says “Did i make myself clear?” “clear as a unmuddied lake, sir”. What is "bad self" according to Alex?: People are good because they choose to be good. Alex says that he likes to be bad tho. But he also says "God either made you good, or he made you bad" There is nothing in between. How is modern youth?: Lack of parental discipline, wild. The Society: A Clockwork Orange takes place in a futuristic city governed by a repressive, totalitarian super-State. In this society, ordinary citizens have fallen into a passive stupor of complacency, blind to the insidious growth of a rampant, violent youth culture. The protagonist of the story is Alex, a fifteen-year-old boy who narrates in a teenage slang called nadsat, which incorporates elements of Russian and Cockney English. Alex leads a small gang of teenage criminals—Dim, Pete, and Georgie—through the streets, robbing and...
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...Victoria Allred Prof. Olson ENG 2309.007 September 18, 2013 Morality Play In A Clockwork Orange written by Anthony Burgess, we read about a fifteen year old boy, named Alex, from Britain in the nineteen-seventy’s. He goes through many obstacles and many questions arrive in the readers mind about the treatment of citizens and the control of government. We watch this boy go through some many harsh times and the biggest question is if humans should have their free will to choose good or evil, or if the government should be able to choose that there will be nothing but good in the world. And as the prison Charles and F. Alexander said, “A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man” (pg. 100). I believe that moral depravity is much better than forced morality. The main point that Burgess makes in this book is that a humans right to choose good or evil is essential to society. During the book, Alex goes through a treatment that is supposed to cure his desire to be evil. This treatment was a liquid substance that was injected into his bloodstream that made Alex became sick at the sight or thought of evil. When Alex tells F. Alexander, a writer, about the things he went through, he says, “They have turned you into something other than a human being” (pg. 100). Alex cannot do as he pleases without getting that horrid sick feeling. And sometimes he even feels as if he wants to end his own life. The treatment does keep Alex from doing evil but it also keeps him from defending himself...
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...Introduction It was the year of 1516 when Utopia was brought into being by Sir Thomas Moore, and from then on to the 19th century, utopian fiction has experienced a development and a dramatic turn into just the opposite tone, dystopian. These two distinctive streams in British literature, with a same distant source, contain totally different settings—if the utopian novels have demonstrated the perfectly idealized future society for mankind, then the dystopian ones describe the least ideal society, and it is usually considered that a dystopia is the vision of a society in which condition of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain.1 As material civilization develops into a certain level and can be considered as more than sufficient, then the world is superior to spiritual civilization; however human spirit is the reflection and is controlled by the substances. So, in a highly-developed society with rich material life and high technology, human spirit indeed has no real freedom. Of course, flooding modernized technologies provide human beings a better living condition, but they are covering up an empty and weak spiritual world. Human beings are made to be squeezed to become the flat and instrumental existence surround by machines which makes them feel it is a perfect world. It is obvious...
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...A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess I chose the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess because I have watched the movie and I really wanted to read the book. The blurb also shows a dark and interesting book “A Clockwork Orange is the shocking seminal novel that spawned one of the most notorious films ever made...Alex and his thrill-seeking gang indulge in violence...rape and drugs”. The first page already suggests that Alex is a troubled leader of his gang sitting in the milk bar drinking a glass of milk which is laced with illegal drugs, making plans for the evening. I predicted A Clockwork Orange would be an easy going, interesting novel that hopefully I could relate to. I was particularly interested how the characters were introduced. Alex and his droogs (friends), Dim, Pete and Georgie as sitting in the Korova Milk Bar, a place that serves milk injected with illegal drugs like stimulants, trying to decide what to do for the night. Alex and his droogs are young, with lots of money and very well dressed, “Waisty Jackets without lapels...with big built up shoulders...off white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud...hair not too long...and big flip horrowshow boots for kicking”. The Author also describes the other patrons surrounding the bar, with a man hallucinating on the milk next to the boys and young girls in tight bright dresses on the other side of the bar. These people and the surroundings are different to what would experience today in our...
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...Examining Classical Conditioning in A Clockwork Orange: Realizing its potential for good and bad Cory Latour St. Lawrence University Psychology blossomed as a relevant field of study in the 19th century, as emerging social constructs like individualism and romanticism encouraged scholars to evolve the study of human behavior (Carlson, Miller, Heth, Donahoe, & Martin, 2010). At the beginning of the 20th century, one question provoked notable research: how can learning be studied? Learning is defined as an enduring shift in behavior or knowledge due to experience, and Ivan Pavlov and Edward Thorndike both designed experiments that measured how these long-lasting changes occurred; the pair’s research introduced the idea of conditioning into the field of psychology (Carlson et al., 2010). Pavlov and Thorndike differed in experimental methods, but their research ultimately concluded that one achieves learning through conditioning, which is a construct that modifies behavior through the operant and classical procedures (Carlson et al., 2010). Thorndikes’s investigation exemplifies operant conditioning, while Pavlov’s study highlights classical conditioning. Operant conditioning is a type of learning where responses are the result of consequences (Carlson et al., 2010). One example of the experiment placed a cat in a box where a latch was the only means to get out; whenever the cat successfully pulled the latch (the response), Thorndike rewarded it with food (eliciting...
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...In the novel A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, there is a change in the narrator’s mentality. In this three-part book one noticed a progression in this young teen as he grows older and his life changes. Part one, Alex is a troubled teen causing ciaos in his town with his goons, known as “Droogs”. They are a menace to society and satisfaction is brought to them by fighting, using drugs, and violating women. Part two differs from part one because one saw Alex incarcerated which causing a violent change to him because he is the first to be tested in a new treatment to change his lawless behaviors. Lastly, in part three a new side of Alex presents itself. He shows emotion unlike anything seen before in the novel. These three parts of the book show this progression in Alex be goes through the stages of...
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