A Clockwork Orange
(Anthony Burgess)
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is one of many famous presentations of the individual's plight in struggling against society. However, the novel's defining and most challenging feature, which sets it apart from other stories of a similiar theme, is that it is a shocking obstacle to accept the main protagonist as protagonist at all!
Alex, a boy of 15 years at the start of the novel, is the narrating star who leads us through his treacherous hellraising that begins at nightfall. Robberies, rapes, and overall brutalities enacted upon innocent adults are related by Alex to the reader in the language invented by Burgess, a slang used by Alex and his teen comrades that reflects the numbed, destruction-seeking minds which utilize it. The slang language is one of the clearest symbols used to differentiate Alex's generation of anarchist, nihilist youth from the peaceful, normally-literate older generation, and it is directly tied into the soul of the novel.
As the reader is forced to witness Alex and his gang commit horror after horror, Burgess then twists the story in order to present the individual vs. society in his own new light, as he demands one to objectively consider Alex's fate after what one has seen him capable of.
Alex is caught by the police, and is chosen as a special test subject of a process that may indeed cause a devious, murdering adolescent such as he to become a calm, proper citizen. However, its technique may truly take away the subject's choice between a benevolent or malicious existence, the choice to live according to one's own will.
As Alex lives out the consequences of his former life, the consequences of the process, Burgess presents to the reader the possible implications of eradicating human evil by means of force, destroying one's potential to coexist with an evil mind, or destroying one's choice in the matter.
A Clockwork Orange asks if something as organic, lucious, and rich as an orange, complex as a human mind, retains its beauty at all, if it is wound like clockwork... one-way, choice-less, and predictable.
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