Reading for Pleasure

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

I read a book by Anthony Burgess not long ago and I was deeply impressed by the plot and the problems portrayed in this novel. The novel is devoted to the problems of young people and society – political, criminal, governmental and family conflicts.

A 15-year-old Alex is the main character of the novel. He was strolling about on the night streets of New York with his small gang. They were robbing shops, hurting elderly people, and raping young girls. Though Alex goes to an approved school, his parents don’t pay much attention to his upbringing. They believe him to be working in stores during his evenings and to be studying at school in the afternoon. Like most parents, they consider their son to be a ‘perfect boy’. In reality, while visiting night clubs, bars, and drinking alcohol, he’s turning into a real criminal.

After being betrayed by his friends, Alex was sent to prison for 7 years, based on an accusation of murdering a rich old woman. After he had been in prison for 2 years, the government developed a scientific method to turn criminals into positive kind people in two-weeks time. Alex serves as the first to test this method.

Alex was planning on leaving his prison cell as soon as possible and after that to wreck revenge on his former friends. Then he planned to continue living his criminal lifestyle. But he had to change his plans once he understood the idea of the treatment: a person could no longer choose between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The criminal who was being treated had only the choice of good deeds, because even the very thought of doing someting bad caused vomiting attack and a terrible stomachache. The ache was so unbearable that he would do anything just to get rid of it.

Alex was given drug injections and shown violent films all in order to exhaust his organism. He hardly survived two weeks of torture and suffering. And the day of his final test came. He was called names, annoyed, and put down, but each time he had to react calmly, kindly and tenderly. All the doctors, policemen and politicians saw that he had certainly become “good”. Anyone would consider that method to be a good one to make good people out of robbers and criminals. But the main horror was that the person had no possibility to choose by himself, he had no right to choose. Criminals were no more than dolls turned into mechanical beings. They saw no evil in their actions, they didn’t know and couldn’t guess yet that Alex’s life could be “a toy in powerful hands”.

The world hadn’t improved but had become even worse when Alex was released from prison. He was driven away by his parents and his old friends beat him. Poor, beaten, and without choice, Alex was found by a young writer and politician who helped the youth and took him home. Two years earlier a gang of young criminals had broken into this writer’s house, they raped his wife and she died after that. And the leader of that gang was our Alex. The writer and his friends decide to use Alex as a living example of the government experiment. But to make this example more vivid proof they needed Alex to die, and they tried to drive him to commit suicide.

Alex would have been glad to die, but he survived. He was taken to hospital and different people visited him. Even the Minister of Home Affairs visited Alex. He promised him a good life saying that he would be cured, and he would regain the right of choice between good and evil. After being cured, Alex renewed his criminal way of life, and he found a new criminal gang that carried out violent actions.

CONFLICT BETWEEN GENERATIONS

The problems of growing up and getting older have always been the sharpest ones. This happens because a new generation brings to life new ideas challenging the old ideas. This contradiction is the basis of the inter-generational conflict. The problem of raising young people without conflict has always been real. Over many centuries, not depending on the political situation, this theme is painful for both adults and teenagers and, as the adults are the parents, so in fact, it’s a problem of parents and children. Many fictional works are devoted to the question of social formation. One of the best-known is “Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess published in 1962. The teenagers’ entertainment, described by Burgess, is to be violent to force people to suffer physically and mentally. They did it, mostly, because they were bored. Aggressiveness, rudeness, cynicism, and cruelty are the main features of these night hooligans’ behaviour. The qualities of these teens’ characters are described very vividly in this novel and to read it is very scary. The author describes the scene of gangsters attacking people so boldly that it becomes unpleasant to read. And you feel disgust and hatred toward the organizers of such attacks. It seemed fair that Alex was imprisoned and injected with hormonal medicine in order to get rid of his desire to cause suffering. But we also feel pity for him because his organism was changed forever; he did not have freedom of choice, or responsibility anymore. Now he lacked the qualities that made a human different from an animal. This terrible treatment yielded its result: Alex was turned into a man who couldn’t harm anyone even in a case of self-defence. For society, such a situation is one of the methods of suppression.

Depicting Alex’s cure, the author supposes that the government will succeed in solving its social and public problems. And the cure did have positive results. In a way, the author writes a utopian novel, showing one of the ways to solve problems. Utopia is an attractive future every society wants to have. Though the government had good intentions, they couldn’t obtain order in the society using these medical methods.

Alex was a bright representative of his society, but someone who acted violently. When Alex was put in prison, the society didn’t change. He was sure to be led by his egoism, self-respect, desire for power, desire to put people down; the government itself did the same with its citizens. The first part of the book is about Alex’s violent activity, the second is about committing violence on Alex. We feel sorry for him. Having acted violently in his past, now he is taken compassion on because he suffers from violence of different political forces (militiamen, doctors, politicians). A question arises: “What is happening in society? Who is right? Who should be protected? And who should be put into prison?”

PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY

This novel is about teenagers, those whose characters are not yet formed. These immature opinions and these feelings of cruelty are very common for them. The problem of raising youth is followed by another problem – the problem of personality and freedom of this personality. The author is looking for ways to create a happy society or a society without violence. The government find special people who will look after the order (the police), but they also go beyond morality into immorality. When people are cruel to others, society has to put them away, making them even more insensitive and cruder. The author went even further. He used a chemical cure to change the psychological reaction of the (anti)hero. Having become kind and mild, not capable of violence, our hero became impotent to face any debasement or to defend himself from beating and psychological suppression. Alex became a mechanical doll, a toy in other people’s hands. He couldn’t live in the society which was not at all ideal. He wasn’t able to do anything in conflict situations, to struggle to assert himself. The tragic moment in the novel underlines that this method of trying to make a new, violence-free society will fail because there will always be those who will use weakness and manipulate the weak wills of other people. And such a society will itself turn into the society of weak people having no vital strength.

If a person can’t choose to violate others as a possibility to do evil it means that he can’t choose, decide by himself what is good and what is evil. The problem of personal freedom is the main idea of the novel.

Youth as a certain part of the society is the most open and vulnerable. Teens haven’t yet arrived at the moment of self-definition. You have to understand what is good and what is evil; when there is no threat of the past, there is no soul emotional experience and/or remorse. The government is trying to bring up such a layer of the population through extremes. Firstly, it shows indifference to everything that happens in the streets. It tolerates cruelty and violence developing into crimes and allowing many to escape any punishment. The second position of the government is interference with the inner essence of a man to change his brain and psychology, making him a puppet without his core qualities.

Idleness, vague future plans and no perspectives for youth coupled with a lack of good jobs and high salaries drives teenagers towards interest in criminal actions, in committing violence on those who couldn’t stand it.

THE GOVERNMENT PROBLEMS

If there is no kindness, no interests, no hobbies, nothing to do, young people will spend their free time in robberies, attacks and violence. The problem is not only with the possibility to choose between good and evil, violence and clemency; the problem is also in the fact that the government doesn’t want to interfere in people’s lives, doesn’t want to understand them. It must provide good life, honest work and leisure for everybody – especially for youth. It mustn’t put limits to and make living according – its rules restrictive, but give an opportunity to live with dignity. Then there will be no interest in such criminal hobbies.

When reading the novel, you are scared of that wild behaviour, rudeness and violence that Alex’s gang were practicing. You feel a strong desire to put the book aside and begin reading something much more pleasant like “Assya” or “The First Love” by I.S. Turgenev. The scenes of raping 12-year-old girls, scenes of beating up an old professor, robbing the writer’s family, shoplifting and taunting drunks are disgusting. But when the hero was put into prison, sympathy replaces hatred toward him. Your attitude to him becomes contradictory. Yesterday I was eager to see him die. Now he is suffering and I feel sorry for him. Violence itself is unnatural, even toward Alex. It seemed to me that Alex was the source of evil in this society. But when he had been isolated, society didn’t change. It became even cruder.

Does that mean that evil can’t be defeated? Another evil follows the previous evil. Was Alex the source of evil or was he just a part of society in which evil was normal? It means that society can’t become non-violent just by having sent Alex away. Yes, Alex is cruel. But first he did evil things to others and now his victims do evil things to him. They were certainly offended and now they want revenge. But the revenge becomes awful and brings our hero to the edge of his life, destruction. Their revenge has no limits and they’ve turned into executioners. Their once-justified anger is changed into unlimited taunting. So there are no positive characters in the book! Even Alex’s parents, being mild-mannered and kind, had taken a tenant while Alex was in prison and so they sent their son away, not because of his evil actions, but because of money. There are no good people in the novel. And there are no people having only good features in the society.

Living in Russia, we want to believe that such problems abroad are easier solved but it appears not to be so simple. The problems are so complicated and it is impossible to solve them. And the problems are the same in all countries because they are the problems of development and raising a person to adulthood. The freedom of every person defines the level of development in a society.

The novel is a moral protest: the government intentions to solve problems in an easier and shorter way were a complete failure. A film shot on the basis of this book is far less strained. But the problems raised in the film made it shocking and popular at the same time. It is very strange that there is no information about it in the Internet, only the author and his book were mentioned. The problems were not discussed anywhere although the book was very popular and the film shot by S. Kubrick was a success.

DID ALEX COME TO THE CONCLUSION?

The final scene of the novel is Alex in the Cow Bar, drinking milk with a drug mixture, surrounded by his new criminal friends. I was very sorry for him when he was suffering during his treatment and was feeling painful changes in his body and in his soul. He was pitiful and I was eager to think that, having suffered a lot, he would never go back to his old way of life and he would change forever. But being released from prison, Alex found a new gang and continued the same way of life as before. The gang members might suffer Alex’s fate or die.

‘How could it be?’ I asked myself. Did his cruel treatment teach him nothing? Didn’t he make any conclusion which could help him to change? If the end of the novel was the scene in the Cow Bar (as it was in the film) it would a tragedy of a personality not capable of escaping this vicious circle. But the writer leaves us hope.

In conclusion, A. Burgess describes Alex’s unwillingness to take part in a new criminal action of the gang, separating from the gang and meeting his old friend, who had married and changed his lifestyle. Alex also decided to find a woman to spend his whole life with. Desire for change is evidently at the bottom of his heart. He is gaining other values and other interests. He would like to have a child and a family of his own.

I would like to breathe a sigh of relief – not everything is lost in social life. There is space for kindness, renovation, rebirth and new ideas. There is hope that one day the good will win over evil. It was not easy to read this novel to the end, but, having read it, I felt relief that everything ended well.