Final writing test - Literary essay on 'A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess

Literary essay on A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Most people have seen the movie A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick; many have been shocked by the extreme violence shown in the film - it was rated X in the United States when it came out, and it was banned from movie theaters in the United Kingdom. Some people obviously didn’t understand the morale of the story; but maybe they would have if they had first read the novel by Anthony Burgess on which the movie was based. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess points out how important is the freedom of choice. This is achieved first through the evolution of Alex, the main character and narrator of the book, and also by a few interventions of another character : the prison chaplain.

The main subject of interest in A Clockwork Orange is Alex’s evolution; it shows how you can choose, of be forced to do things. He is at first a teenager who lives in a futuristic and fascist England. He groups with his friends at night to commit violent crimes. They fight other gangs, beat up people, rape women and rob houses. At that point, he lives his life the way he has chosen to. He then gets caught by the police after killing a woman, so he is sent to prison. During the two following years, he starts acting good; however it is only in the hope of getting out faster. This allows him to be chosen to try a new reformation technique that the fascist government wants to use to empty the prisons and force criminals into the ‘’good way’’. After the treatment he can’t act violently anymore. As soon as he thinks of violence or sex, he feels unsustainable pain. At one point he even wants to commit suicide because his life has became unlivable; however he is not able to do it because of the treatment : he can’t be violent against anyone, not even himself. This shows that he can’t choose anymore; he is forced to be good and can do nothing against it. He does not even have the freedom to choose whether he wants to live or not. After becoming bad again near the end of the story, however, he meets one of his old friends who since then has got married and now lives a normal life. Alex then realizes that everything he has done before was bad, and suddenly sees the point in living the ‘’good way’’. This leads the reader to the conclusion that if you let one choose, he might not make the right choice from the first time, but he eventually will.

The exact message intended by the author is revealed by the prison chaplain. When the reader first meets him, Alex is in jail and appears to have turned to religion. When Alex tells the priest that he’d like to test the Ludovico technique, the holy man replies that Alex should be happy to redeem himself through religion. He also believes that the new treatment is inhuman because it does not leave any choice. He states that forced goodness might not be better than chosen depravity. His other important intervention in the story is when Alex is put as an example in front of representatives and serves as a demonstration of the new technique. After seeing him unable to act the way he should and obviously wants to, the priest comes up and asks a very relevant question : ‘’And what about choice?’’. He calls attention to the fact that Alex does not decide to be passive because he thinks violence is bad; he does it because he is afraid of physical pain. He also points out that by denying a man’s ability to make his own decisions, you also deny his very human nature. When one does not have complete control over his acts, he isn’t really alive, he just exists.

A Clockwork Orange is a good example of dystopian novels, which warn people against the threat of an oppressive regime. Anthony Burgess uses his book to show the importance of being free to make our own decisions and choices. The plot of the story – or more precisely the evolution in the main character – makes a great job of demonstrating the author’s point, which is also explicitly exposed by a character of the book, the prison chaplain, who is revolted by a new reformation technique that forces criminals to be good by using physical torture.

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