19) Essay questions

F. Alexander refers to Alex as a 'victim of the modern age'. To what extent do yo agree with this?

Some commentators say that Burgess in the novel is disagreeing with John Stuart Mill's principle of harm (that free will is allowable as long as it does no harm to others). Do you agree with this and what might the repercussions of such a stance be?

What role does religion play in the novel?

To what extent can we blame Alex's parents for the destruction that he wreaks throughout the book?

Does the introduction of Nadsat simply make the violence of the novel palatable?

To what extent is the novel a critique of cinema and its tendency to turn violence into a sensual pleasure?

Look here for some more essay titles.

And another set of questions here.

18) The 'Missing' Last Chapter

When the book was first published in America, the publishers did not like the last chapter, complaining that it was unrealistic, that it was unbelievable that someone might reform in the way that Alex seems to do. The US editor claimed the last chapter was 'bland'. Burgess said that he went along with this as he needed the money. More importantly, Stanley Kubrick, the director of the (in)famous film, only knew of the US version, so the film does not have the 21st chapter. Kubrick later said he preferred the darker view of humanity that the doctored version presented.

So, two versions of the book existed; two versions that clearly contrasted. One ends with Alex proclaiming ironically that he was 'cured'. The conditioning had been reversed by the doctors while he was unconscious and the reader might imagine him setting off on another rampage, heading off for some more 'ultra-violence' and bit of the old 'twenty-to-one'. He is unregenerate, unrepentant, seemingly evil to the core. The other showed the possibility that Alex would grow up and settle down. Chapter 21 (the traditional age of entering adulthood) sets up the expectation that Alex would become fed up with random acts of violence as he starts becoming interested in 'normal' things: money, 'seeking a mate', and little fat babies. Could Alex reach a point of maturity and find redemption by himself? Left to his own devices could he choose to do 'good'?

In the real final chapter your humble narrator states his belief that youths are like animals or little wind-up toys. They have no real sense of moral responsibility. Their actions are instinctive and inherently selfish and yet to deprive them of the right to choose to do harm would be to turn them into automatons. Many readers, it seems, consider this to be Burgess's standpoint, but we must also keep in mind the fact that these opinions are expressed by the little psychopath himself, the unreliable narrator who has proved to be entertainingly eloquent but totally solipsistic and certainly not a character to take at face value.

Have a look at the wikipedia section on the omission of the final chapter.

Now, write an argument for or against cutting the final chapter. Write 200 words for and 200 against.

17) The Structure of the Novel

The structure of A Cl

ockwork Orange is based upon three parts. There are seven chapters in each part. Three sections + seven chapters per section = twenty one total chapters. The number of chapters is intentional by Anthony Burgess. Human maturity is symbolized by the number 21, according to Anthony Burgess’s introductory remarks. The book’s number of chapters is no accident; it is intentionally so, and hints of adult responsibility.

As you read through Part Three you should start to notice a kind of structural symmetry. Each chapter in Part Three has something in common with its mirror-image chapter from Part One, such that Chapter 1 here connects with Chapter 7 from Part O

ne. The connections can be made as follows:

Part 1 Part 3

Ch1 <> Ch7

Ch2 <> Ch6

Ch3 <> Ch5

Ch4 <> Ch4

Ch5 <> Ch3

Ch6 <> Ch2

Ch7 <> Ch1

Consider, for example how Alex’s arrest in Pt1 Ch7 is reversed by his release in Pt 3 Ch1. Also, the attack on the old lady in Pt 1 Ch6 is mirrored by the attack by the old men on Alex in the library in Pt 3 Ch2. Look for other ways in which episodes in Pt 1 are mirrored or reversed or referred to in Pt 3. Consider, for example the use of m

usic in Pt 1.
Burgess was also a composer of music. He clearly had operatic structure in mind when composing A Clockwork Orange. This structural symmetry is an example as well as how motifs and symbols recur throughout the story. The ‘What’s it going to be then eh?’ is repeated in different contexts with slightly different meanings. Milk recurs throughout the book as something that is considered clean and healthy but can be corrupted. Consider how it is ‘enhanced’ at the Korova Milkbar or its use by Dim to attack Alex or the recurrence of milk at the home of the ‘cat lady’. Other motifs or symbols inc

lude the use of nadsat, the figure of christ, and classical music itself.

Make a grid like the one above and add as many exam

ples of how episodes in Pt 3 reflect those of Pt1. Consider how the Ludovico technique is at the centre of the book (Pt2 Ch4) and how everything piv

ots around this.

16) Wider Reading

If you liked A Clockwork Orange, you might want to do some wider reading...

Some books that share certain features with A Clockwork Orange:

1984 by George Orwell

Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, the Thought Police--George Orwell's world-famous novel coined new and potent

words of warning for us all.

Alive with Swiftian wit and passion, it is on

e of the most brilliant satires on totalitarianism and the power-hungry ever written.

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

There aren't many

books, particularly written as recently as 1961, that have contributed a phrase so thoroughly to the English language as this one. Describing inherently paradoxical traps as a catch-22 is now common slang; this is where it started.

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created

the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. B

ernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress

...

Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in t

he Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent". Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his 16-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island, is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

A Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality...macabre, bizarre ...quite impossible to put down.

The narrator of Iain Banks's novel, 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, is looking to explain a mystery. He lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. His father dissembles and has secrets. He has a study, which is always locked; Frank has never seen inside it. At intervals in the narrative he tries the door, hoping that one day his father will forget to lock it. In the way of a fairy-tale or a gothic yarn, we know that we will enter this mysterious chamber before the novel ends.

15) Part 3 Chs 5-7

Summary and Analysis of Part Three, chapters 5-7 (The end of the book)


http://www.gradesaver.com/a-clockwork-orange/study-guide/section6/

14) Part 3 Chs 1-4

Summary and analysis of Part three, chapters 1-4.

http://www.gradesaver.com/a-clockwork-orange/study-guide/section6/

13) A Short Essay on Clockwork Orange

(This is an excerpt from a really good article. Read the bits of it here and click on the link to see more)

A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece
Theodore Dalrymple

When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called “ultra-violence.”

The film had been controversial in Britain; its detractors, who wanted it banned, charged that it glamorized and thereby promoted violence. The young men dressed as droogs seemed to confirm the charge, though of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still, even a merely sartorial identification with psychopathic violence shocked me, for it implied an imaginative sympathy with such violence; and seeing those young men outside the theater was my first intimation that art, literature, and ideas might have profound—and not necessarily favorable—social consequences. A year later, a group of young men raped a 17-year-old girl in Britain as they sang “Singing in the Rain,” a real-life replay of one of the film’s most notorious scenes.

The author of the book, Anthony Burgess, a polymath who once wrote five novels in a year, came to dislike this particular work intensely, not because of any practical harm to society that the film version of it might have caused but because he did not want to go down in literary history as the author of a book made famous, or notorious, by a movie. Irrespective of the value of his other work, however, A Clockwork Orange remains a novel of immense power. Linguistically inventive, socially prophetic, and philosophically profound, it comes very close to being a work of genius.

...
...

A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like “malenky machines” who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resort to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty? Can we bypass consciousness and reflection in our struggle to behave well?

There are no schematic answers in the book. One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them. To have combined this with acute social prophecy (to say nothing of entertainment) is genius.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_oh_to_be.html


Continue Reading Here

12) Behaviourism (Behaviorism)

Some notes on Behaviourism


Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
--John Watson, Behaviorism, 1930
From:
http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/f/behaviorism.htm


Both Anthony Burgess's landmark novel A Clockwork Orange and the subsequent film directed by the legendary Stanley Kubrick move to lift B.F. Skinner's psychological theory of Behaviorism to a sphere that even he may have thought unlikely. Or, probably, merely hoped with all his heart wouldn't be considered by rational human beings. What is Behaviorism? In a nutshell, Behaviorism is BF Skinner's psychological theory which posits the potentially devastating notion that positive reinforcement through reward for good behavior combined with negative reinforcement through punishment for bad behavior will instill in a person a deep-seated aspiration to continue that behavior in the pursuit of the reward. Behaviorist techniques have become the norm in contemporary society in everything from the educational system to politics to entertainment.
From:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/328648/what_is_behaviorism_and_is_it_a_good.html?cat=72

A complex explanation:
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/behaviour.htm

A slightly more accessible version:
http://www.funderstanding.com/content/behaviorism

11) The Ludovico Technique

This is a page from Wikipedia on the Ludovico Technique

The Ludovico technique is a fictional drug-assisted aversion therapy from the novel and film A Clockwork Orange. It involves the patient being forced to watch violent images for long periods of time, while under the effect of drugs that cause a near death experience. The idea is that if the patient is forced to watch the horribly graphic rapes, assaults and other acts of violence while suffering from the drug effects, the patient will assimilate the sensations and then become incapacitated or very ill either attempting to perform or even just witnessing said acts of violence.

The Ludovico technique is an artistic semblance of the psychological phenomenon known as classical conditioning which is a form of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation. In the story of A Clockwork Orange, when the protagonist, Alex, is made the subject of the Ludovico technique, he is conditioned to associate his illness with violence.
In the process of creating both the novel and film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, original author Anthony Burgess and film director Stanley Kubrick both went to painstaking effort to incorporate a plethora of symbols for the context of the story.

Social background

Much of the film reflects the fears, and logical extrapolations, of the time in which it was made: Massive unemployment, moral decay, and the various liberal and conservative approaches to the resultant crime. The main character Alex, a hedonist, sadist and sociopath, reflects the end result of such a future dystopia. The fictional Ludovico technique plays a crucial role as both a plot device and social commentary.

After his capture and incarceration for murder (the conservative approach to crime) he volunteers for the Ludovico Technique (a technocratic approach to crime) in hopes of early release, not having any idea what the treatment entails. One crucial plot device is that while being forced to watch scenes of violence and cruelty, he is also forced to watch old newsreels of totalitarian regimes in an attempt to cure him of every conceivable social aberration. One such film repeatedly shown was Triumph of the Will. Unfortunately the original scores were also played with these newsreels, many of which were his one socially acceptable vice; his love for the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven. (The coincidence of this is emphasized by the name Burgess chose for the fictional technique: "Ludovico" is an Italian form of "Ludwig".) Thus while being 'cured' of violence and social aberration, he is also forever denied the music of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It is this 'flaw' in the treatment that allows Alex to eventually undo his treatment, and after surviving an attempt on his life by one of his former victims, the film ends with him being made a political pawn in the crime debate, as he begins to once again imagine doing all the sociopathic things he did before.