This was a crazy read. I bit hard to understand at first, but great once I got into it. ( )

I know Burgess doesn't like the idea of writing anything that appears to "moralize," but this novel definitely suffers from the addition of the 21st chapter. The themes that the author seems to be building--on the nature of man, on freedom, on morality--all seem to be reduced to "Oh, those are merely the problems of youth, and will disappear with age" in the final resolution. Very postmodern, very disappointing.

I always advise my friends to read the first 20 chapters, stop and draw conclusions/react, and then read the final chapter to see how one's opinions are changed. ( )

I know, I know it's a good book. Still, it drove me crazy. ( )

When I saw that A Clockwork Orange was on the book list for our AP English “Utopias and Dystopia’s” unit, I immediately knew that I wanted to read it. I’d heard that it was disturbing and controversial and just strange. So I wanted to see why. And after finishing the novel, I can see why. It’s violent, spine chilling, disturbing, and made me question what I knew about good, evil, and the power of free will.
The story is told from the point of view of Alex, a teenager growing up in England in a future where the government is a permanent source of fear and abuse for average citizens and gangs of teenagers violently roam the streets in protest. Alex, at first, is an unsympathetic protagonist committing horrific crimes with pleasure and always looking for his next robbery or fight or rape victim. Eventually he gets caught and is sent to jail where, lured by early release, he decides to enlist in an experimental program designed by the government to make him “good”. Failing to beat the system, Alex becomes conditioned to be good against his will, he becomes, as the book calls it, a clockwork orange, a mere piece of clockwork in the society. And as Alex faces the pain of having free will taken away, the reader is forced to question whether or not goodness in a society is worth losing the right to free choice, the very thing that makes us human. Is a society of good-doers worth losing the population’s sense of humanity?
At first I thought this book was pointlessly violent with no plot. But once the story began to unfold, I was hooked. I loved it. I even started feeling sympathy towards nasty little Alex. My advice to those reading is to just push through the first third of the book, it may seem horrid and terribly pointless, but all the violence has a point that’s revealed at the end. Also, make sure to buy the book with the dictionary in the back of the book because Alex speaks in the teenage slang of his time. You can infer what’s going on without the dictionary but it makes reading so much easier and faster. ( )

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

The question begins each section in A Clockwork Orange, and really focuses the issues of morality versus social acceptability raised in the book. "A clockwork orange" is a startling and unnatural image, an organic process which has been robbed of its "naturalness."

Alex, our narrator, becomes as clockwork and inorganic when the state cures his violent tendencies through intense aversion therapy. But such a method raises severe questions of morality: what behaviors does society deem "acceptable," who specifically is making these calls, and how much pressure is the government allowed to put upon its citizens to force them to conform? Maybe the answer lies in understanding appropriate channels for behavior, rather than what behaviors themselves are appropriate: some teenagers are juvenile delinquents, others (as Alex discovers) grow up to be police officers with a "reasonable" amount of violence inherent in their jobs. Society may need a certain amount of governance and boundaries in people's behavior, but how can we both promote that while keeping legislation out of the area of limiting us all to clockwork oranges?

Another note: the American editions, until 1986, were published without the final chapter; the publisher liked the tone imparted in the penultimate chapter better and so decided to just cut Chapter 21 (an epilogue or resolution of sorts). This chapter, along with a note of explanation by Burgess, is available here:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/do...