A Clockwork Orange

The Clockwork Orange, by: Anthony Burgess has a constant struggle of the individual going against what society wants the main character Alex, to conform to. From the beginning of the book to the start of the final chapter, Alex is considered a , “common criminal”(Burgess, 92), and is even convicted of murder when he is fifteen years old. But after the initial break with his way of life against society’s rules, the book also brings up the concept of free will to always choose what you are when the government tries to reform him by taking away his ability to choose to do what they consider bad.
Alex is a fifteen year old bully in a gang of four including himself, who does nothing more than bully the old, fight other gangs and rob people of their innocence. Any principles the society tried to impose Alex completely disregarded. He also saw the world and beyond as all the same, as can be seen in his response to his friend Dim’s question to what’s out there in the universe, “There’ll be life like down here most likely, which some getting knifed and others doing the knifing”. In the first hundred pages of the book Alex commits many crimes (two breaking and entering, eight assaults, Three rapes and two murders), and yet all he feels from these actions is exhilaration. Near the end of the book Alex sat and listened to music thinking of how , “it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum…I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas carving the whole listo of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva” (Burgess, 179), expressing his desire for nothing more then to cause pain to other human beings to feel the same joy that he feels from the listening of Beethoven’s Ninth. Alex’s actions to rebel against society by breaking all of its laws and regulations are fueled by his elation in the pain and the suffering of others. Furthering his experience as society making him a part of it was when he was in jail they took away his name and gave him a number to identify him, 6655321. Alex and his sole purpose to live life his own way would be almost transcendentalist if it weren’t such a narcissistic way of live.
The larger fight between the individual and society when the government in the book actually takes away Alex’s ability to break the law by giving him injections and making him watch films of horrific crimes. The major concept that this procedure (known in the book as the Ludovico’s Technique), is that it physically makes the person sick if they think of hurting someone, think in a violent way, or even watch violence. This made it so that, “the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get hit than give it” (Burgess, 121), and that even though by society he was doing right, it really wasn’t him doing it because he had no choice in the matter. If he has not say in the matter, then its not a choice and its simply the government controlling him, not him conforming. While in normal society it feels like there is no other option, for Alex, there literally became only one thing he could do that wouldn’t make him fall to the ground in pain. Overall, society crept from setting the standard of what is the right way to live, to making it so that people can only live the way they want, turning people into, “your true Christian…ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly” (Burgess, 129). In this way, the book shows how society changes people, a unique organic thing, into a piece of machinery that is only allowed to respond a certain way to a certain situation. The point that this stripping of choice makes us consider the question, “Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?” (Burgess, 95), to which the answer that free will is obviously the only correct answer. Because as a people, what is right and wrong is continually changed, modified, and redefined. However, no matter what the change of belief has been, it has always been the peoples choice to accept these changes or not. There is a sharp difference between bending to a law, and a law that makes you bend.
Overall this book had a concept that not everyone fits into the mold of society, and that it’s not right to try to make them. Alex was made miserable by this attempt of the government to make him good, and nearly drove him to end his life. “The heresy of an age of reason…’I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong” (Burgess, 116).