Critique. Review on A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange is a story about making decisions and their consequences the novel is written somewhat comedically and is greatly disturbing. The main character refers to himself as Your humble narrator, little Alex he is a violent fifteen year old man. He takes great pleasure from drinking milk which has drugs in it, raping young women, stealing from anyone whom he sees fit, assaulting and inflicting harm to people as well as property. He does not see anything wrong with his actions he takes it more into something to pass the time, he does not think of the harm that he is causing.

On one of his many night of causing havoc he and his friends brake into an old woman?s home, were he accidentally kills her by hitting her over the head much too hard. When he tries to escape the house one of his friends betrays him and holds him down until the police arrive. He is then taken away by the proper authorities to be reformed.

The story takes place in the future, if there are enough criminals and law enforcement is not capable of protecting society then this foretelling is very much plausible. ?Its association, the oldest educational method in the world.? This type of suggested treatment has worked on Alex and in WWII and would be an effective method of controlling criminals seeing that the treatment only takes four days. It is much better than keeping them in jail for years and having the same effect, this way it will cost the people much less money.

The quality of the work is exceptional the language however is hard to get around. The book uses slang that Alex and other teens vocalize called ?nadsat? which is a mixture of Russian and old English. At the beginning of the novel the reader must read and re-read the sections in order to grasp what the narrorator are convening. However after a couple of chapters we begin to understand what the slang is referring too, there are some parts where the writer leaves much to the imagination but I think this was done on purpose. WE are able to understand the main character only to a certain degree which is parallel to a criminal and a juvenile mind.

One of the social critiques is that of the freedom of choice and who has it and who determines what it is. ??your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of god.? Alex has been transformed from a menace to society to acceptable, pleasant however at the cost of free will.

His offensives rank from murder, rape, vandalism and so much more his punishment is just in the eyes of the government and that is the critique. We will condemn our criminals but to the extent of out casting them from society once they are in the system they will never be able to fit in again. The choice is no longer left to the person who has committed the offence but to the people who will punish them. The way that society is manipulated today is all done by association.

The novel portrays a much drearier image of the future but this is the path that we are taking. ??and then there I was as I was before, the empty glass on the table and wanting to cry and feeling like death was the only answer to everything.? When we no longer fit what our society has deemed fit we no longer want to be part of it, women starve themselves, men use steroid which will eventually kill them to get the perfect physic.

We will kill ourselves to fit into what we are suppose to fit into, the cookie cutter image of having money, being attractive and being successful, not so much intellectually but being better than others. The critique also follows the importance of being able to choose not only that of free will. We need to be able to choose our action if we want to be bad or if we prefer to be good, that is our right as human beings and that is the critique of our society.

There is also the critique of the justice system and how there are constant abuses not only by the guards but by the people who run them. ?Are you not satisfied with beating me near death and having me spat upon and making me confess to crimes for hours on end and then shoving me among bezoomnies and vonny pervert in that grahsny cell?? We continue to hear of the abuses committed inside the prison system and there is no discrimination that being of rape, beatings, perversion and wrongful incarcerations.

Yet because they are criminals or we are told that they are we do not care and think that when a court is called to appeal their sentence or they wish to have their case reviewed we scream that our money is being wasted. And at times most cases that are heard time and time again its because the people that are involved are the ones with the money, for instance Larry Flint, he is a pervert who takes pictures of the female genetalia and sells it. True it proves the point that there is freedom of speech but so much money was wasted people only wanted him in court to prove to America that morals were going down. And if seen from that time to today our standards have been lowered what was unacceptable a couple of years ago is common today. I am not saying Larry Flint had that much control and if he did God so help us, but the American public did have some validity to their claim.

In society today we feel that an eye for an eye is proper justice, if they kill we kill if they take something, we take years of their lives. ?Its only right you should suffer proper. I?ve been told everything that you?ve done?made me real sick a lot of it did.? Regardless of the crime we should not be the ones to cast judgment on others, I am not saying that those criminals should not be punished but it should be done appropriately.

Social thought is that revenge is acceptable and expected when something is done to your person, and to the extent of it there is no line. Once someone has done committed a wrong doing then their punishment will be as long and as insufferable as we see fit. Yet another is that of our numbness to causing harm we see violence regularly and no longer think anything of it, in fact when we are truly disturbed it is shocking to us. ?Go away, I know your dirty tricks, that was real lovely innocence that way, Go away or I?ll set my cats you.?

The disassociation with violence is seen as innocence; not expecting every person to want to attack you is ignorance. We should expect everyone to do us harm and in turn do harm to others, we are not safe in our homes or with our family. We need to lock our doors and be weary of perverted family members because you never know. We engrave this into the minds of our children or our girls, and we are never at peace with one another. ?Violence makes violence,? we do onto others what they have done to us but our society seems to enjoy the more negative aspects of our nature.