First-person narratives seem to come in two general varieties. There's the ones where everything is still written like a book, just from the viewpoint of one of the characters; in these cases, while that character's way of speaking might appear in the dialogue, it stays out of the narration. Then there's the ones where it's formatted more as if the narrator is actually telling the story to you out loud, where everything is filled with the slang they use in their conversations with others, where even the most straightforward things might be obscured by the argot that they fill their speech with, so that until you crack the code, as it were, you need a glossary just to keep up.
A Clockwork Orange is perhaps one of the most quintessential examples of this second form of narrative. Alex, "Your Humble Narrator", govoreets in nadsat as he tells the horrorshow good raskazz with aplomb, and no appy polly loggies if thou art no oomny lewdie who ponies the slovos he skavats, O my brothers.
OK, it's not quite that bad. But there's times where it's not not that bad. It creates a kind of strange effect where the language is utterly jarring at the start, but as you read through the book, it starts to sink in, so that everything makes sense by the end and you're not flipping to your Nadsat-English glossary nearly so often, if you even have one available. This is actually by design; Burgess created an entire slang for the teenage troublemakers in his novel, sort of a combination of the wordplay in Cockney rhyming slang and a sort of pidgin Russian, in an attempt to make everything have a quality that falls outside of any specific time and instead just evokes, well... a dense argot made of near-impenetrable vocabulary that requires the reader to work out meanings from context, unless Your Humble Narrator actually defines the term for you.
A Clockwork Orange is perhaps one of the most quintessential examples of this second form of narrative. Alex, "Your Humble Narrator", govoreets in nadsat as he tells the horrorshow good raskazz with aplomb, and no appy polly loggies if thou art no oomny lewdie who ponies the slovos he skavats, O my brothers.
OK, it's not quite that bad. But there's times where it's not not that bad. It creates a kind of strange effect where the language is utterly jarring at the start, but as you read through the book, it starts to sink in, so that everything makes sense by the end and you're not flipping to your Nadsat-English glossary nearly so often, if you even have one available. This is actually by design; Burgess created an entire slang for the teenage troublemakers in his novel, sort of a combination of the wordplay in Cockney rhyming slang and a sort of pidgin Russian, in an attempt to make everything have a quality that falls outside of any specific time and instead just evokes, well... a dense argot made of near-impenetrable vocabulary that requires the reader to work out meanings from context, unless Your Humble Narrator actually defines the term for you.
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
Alex is... not a likeable character, at least initially. He's unapologetic, and just comes right out with it, talking about how he and his droogs get themselves high on milk laced with amphetamines, go out on the town to cause havoc, and just generally act like complete hooligans. It's not pleasant; the nadsat patterns do a little to abstract it, to give a sort of versy quality that straight narration wouldn't give, but that doesn't change that the end result of the first two chapters is that they've beat up an old man, destroyed three rare books, broken into a tobacconist's and ransacked the place, gotten into a gang fight that ends with someone potentially blinded and another with his cheeks slashed with a razor, stolen a car (which is later dumped into a lake), and gangraped a woman before beating her to death.
Yeah, that's what it's going to be, then.
Alex is profoundly disturbed, clearly. The first third of the book is largely devoted to illustrating this, and there's a lot of it that, well... He seems downright proud of the chaos he's creating, and there's no getting around that he has no sense of the consequences that his actions actually hold, just living his life in a pattern of doing violence, going home, listening to classical music while fantasizing about doing more violence, sleeping, going out during the day and getting into more trouble (on the day we get to see, this involves statutory rape), then going to meet his droogs and starting the cycle all over again. This all ends when his crew decides that they're going to break off from him, and contrive to leave him holding the bag, as it were, when they break into an old woman's house and everything goes sideways. He gets knocked in the head, the droogs run, and he's picked up by the police and carted off to prison.
There's a two-year time skip after that, and we get to see that he's putting on an act of false contrition, working as the audio guy in the prison chapel on Sundays, and getting into conversations about religion with the chaplain, during the seven years he's been sentenced to. He's a fan of the bible, but much more the first part, where there's all the sex and violence. Not so much the later part that's all preachy. It's almost like he's not actually learning anything, but it's at this point that the actual primary theme of the book comes out, the question of free will. See, there's this new treatment that he's been hearing rumors about, where they'll train you to be a good person and then let you out early, and wouldn't that be nice?
Spoiler alert: It's not nice.
After an altercation involving the entire group of his cellmates beating up a new prisoner for making a sexual advance on Alex, and Your Humble Narrator going completely overboard on him after he's already down, Alex is 'volunteered' to be the test case for the Ludovico Technique, which he's initially pleased about, as he thinks this is a perfect way to get out early, and it certainly can't be that bad, right?
Spoiler alert: It's very bad.
It takes a full day for Alex to realize what's actually going on here, and even when he starts to fight against it, he simply... can't. Any thought of resistance makes him physically uncomfortable, so that he's rendered into a state of, well... effectively being an automaton, unable to defend himself, only able to act honorably and nicely toward others, and due to its use in the Technique, even robbed of his ability to enjoy classical music. And then... he's simply turned out, after the proof of his utter rehabilitation has been publicized by the government as evidence that the prison overcrowding problem will soon be over so they'll have room for political prisoners.
Yeah, that's what it's going to be, then.
Alex is profoundly disturbed, clearly. The first third of the book is largely devoted to illustrating this, and there's a lot of it that, well... He seems downright proud of the chaos he's creating, and there's no getting around that he has no sense of the consequences that his actions actually hold, just living his life in a pattern of doing violence, going home, listening to classical music while fantasizing about doing more violence, sleeping, going out during the day and getting into more trouble (on the day we get to see, this involves statutory rape), then going to meet his droogs and starting the cycle all over again. This all ends when his crew decides that they're going to break off from him, and contrive to leave him holding the bag, as it were, when they break into an old woman's house and everything goes sideways. He gets knocked in the head, the droogs run, and he's picked up by the police and carted off to prison.
There's a two-year time skip after that, and we get to see that he's putting on an act of false contrition, working as the audio guy in the prison chapel on Sundays, and getting into conversations about religion with the chaplain, during the seven years he's been sentenced to. He's a fan of the bible, but much more the first part, where there's all the sex and violence. Not so much the later part that's all preachy. It's almost like he's not actually learning anything, but it's at this point that the actual primary theme of the book comes out, the question of free will. See, there's this new treatment that he's been hearing rumors about, where they'll train you to be a good person and then let you out early, and wouldn't that be nice?
Spoiler alert: It's not nice.
After an altercation involving the entire group of his cellmates beating up a new prisoner for making a sexual advance on Alex, and Your Humble Narrator going completely overboard on him after he's already down, Alex is 'volunteered' to be the test case for the Ludovico Technique, which he's initially pleased about, as he thinks this is a perfect way to get out early, and it certainly can't be that bad, right?
Spoiler alert: It's very bad.
It takes a full day for Alex to realize what's actually going on here, and even when he starts to fight against it, he simply... can't. Any thought of resistance makes him physically uncomfortable, so that he's rendered into a state of, well... effectively being an automaton, unable to defend himself, only able to act honorably and nicely toward others, and due to its use in the Technique, even robbed of his ability to enjoy classical music. And then... he's simply turned out, after the proof of his utter rehabilitation has been publicized by the government as evidence that the prison overcrowding problem will soon be over so they'll have room for political prisoners.
Oh, hello there, totalitarianism.
The last part of the book focuses on how miserable Alex's life becomes in the days immediately after his release, culminating in his being manipulated into a suicide attempt by opposition agitators, and... the government undoing the brainwashing through hypnopaedia while he's recovering, and turning him back loose again with his ability to listen to music and his ability to choose between right and wrong restored... which means his ability to do wrong is also restored.
Here's the optional endpoint. The American version of the novel ended here, on its initial release; Stanley Kubrick's film version was based on the American version; though he was aware of the final chapter's existence, he chose to take the indication from Burgess's manuscript and end it right here. Alex comes full circle, and he's just been turned loose again, free will restored, and we don't know what he's going to do from there. He's either learned from his experiences, or he's still a sociopathic monster.
And then there's the final chapter. It starts out as a near-mirror of the first chapter; Alex in the milk bar drinking milk-plus laced with uppers before going out for a night on the town with his new droogs. There's a few differences, though. As part of their apology, the government has given him a job in the music archives, and he gets free discs as part of the perks. So he has money, he doesn't need to steal it. And when the crew gets ready to go cause some havoc, he... feels bored with it. He doesn't really want to. Instead, he tells them to go ahead without him, and leaves them behind, instead going to a tea shop for a cup of chai, and runs into one of the original droogs, who is now married and gainfully employed. And he realizes... maybe being eighteen is too old to be getting up to all this stuff now, maybe he should see about finding himself a romantic partner, and perhaps dropping the nadsat and starting to talk like an adult. In short, maybe he needs to actually grow up. It was all just teenage directionlessness, after all, and you can grow out of that.
So instead of the unclear ending that could go any direction, we get a happy ending where he's off to become a productive member of society. Maybe he'll be a composer. He'd enjoy that.
...I honestly don't know if that last chapter is good or not. There's a collection of essays from Burgess and reviews from others and various relevant writings in the back matter in the copy I have (almost 100 pages' worth, in fact), and it seems like opinions are rather sharply divided on whether that final chapter is or isn't important. Even Burgess seems unsure, and he's the author. It's a very sharp tonal shift from the rest of the book, and honestly feels like it wasn't written with the same vicious energy as the rest of the piece. While it does further the question of what Alex's free will actually entails in the end, it also... just seems like it's not what the rest of the book was building to. It kind of feels like taking the fairy tale Bluebeard and ending it with 'And they all lived happily ever after.'
Here's the optional endpoint. The American version of the novel ended here, on its initial release; Stanley Kubrick's film version was based on the American version; though he was aware of the final chapter's existence, he chose to take the indication from Burgess's manuscript and end it right here. Alex comes full circle, and he's just been turned loose again, free will restored, and we don't know what he's going to do from there. He's either learned from his experiences, or he's still a sociopathic monster.
And then there's the final chapter. It starts out as a near-mirror of the first chapter; Alex in the milk bar drinking milk-plus laced with uppers before going out for a night on the town with his new droogs. There's a few differences, though. As part of their apology, the government has given him a job in the music archives, and he gets free discs as part of the perks. So he has money, he doesn't need to steal it. And when the crew gets ready to go cause some havoc, he... feels bored with it. He doesn't really want to. Instead, he tells them to go ahead without him, and leaves them behind, instead going to a tea shop for a cup of chai, and runs into one of the original droogs, who is now married and gainfully employed. And he realizes... maybe being eighteen is too old to be getting up to all this stuff now, maybe he should see about finding himself a romantic partner, and perhaps dropping the nadsat and starting to talk like an adult. In short, maybe he needs to actually grow up. It was all just teenage directionlessness, after all, and you can grow out of that.
So instead of the unclear ending that could go any direction, we get a happy ending where he's off to become a productive member of society. Maybe he'll be a composer. He'd enjoy that.
...I honestly don't know if that last chapter is good or not. There's a collection of essays from Burgess and reviews from others and various relevant writings in the back matter in the copy I have (almost 100 pages' worth, in fact), and it seems like opinions are rather sharply divided on whether that final chapter is or isn't important. Even Burgess seems unsure, and he's the author. It's a very sharp tonal shift from the rest of the book, and honestly feels like it wasn't written with the same vicious energy as the rest of the piece. While it does further the question of what Alex's free will actually entails in the end, it also... just seems like it's not what the rest of the book was building to. It kind of feels like taking the fairy tale Bluebeard and ending it with 'And they all lived happily ever after.'
Yes, she inherits Bluebeard's wealth and gives all the previous wives proper burials and gets herself remarried herself... but no way she's just living happily ever after. Not after that trauma. That's not how psychology works. Darn fairy tales and their need for happy endings.
I dunno. I genuinely can't decide if I prefer the book stopping with the open ending or with the happy ending. I do think the happy ending is horribly flawed.
A tough, but ultimately worthy read.
I dunno. I genuinely can't decide if I prefer the book stopping with the open ending or with the happy ending. I do think the happy ending is horribly flawed.
A tough, but ultimately worthy read.
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