A Clockwork Orange

A detailed Summary of A Clockwork Orange

The story of A Clockwork Orange takes place in an awful future of the author's mind, ran by a repressive government, violent street gangs, and a poor quality of life. The narrator is the protagonist, Alex, who tells his story in language mixed with "nadsat talk," the slang used by the teenage hooligans of the novel. Alex, at the start of the novel, is a happy, yet violent, 15-year-old hoodlum who enjoys rape, violence, thievery, and leading Dim, Pete, and Georgie, his gang of teenage criminals. To amuse themselves, they break in one night to a cottage in the country, where they beat up the man they find inside and violently rape his wife. This is a typical night for the violent gang of teens. The boys go on their way and go back to their favorite hangout. At the bar, a woman breaks out into song, a little bit of opera. When Dim makes an obscene gesture toward her, Alex, a fan of classical music, punches him. It seems to Dim and the others that arrogant little Alex is overstep!

ping his rights as a leader, and they plan to betray him. The next time they go out, they break into the house of an old woman. When she calls the police, Dim slaps Alex across the eyes with his chain and they all run away, leaving their former leader behi

Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. After only two years there, he is chosen as an ideal first candidate for a new treatment called Ludovico's Technique. This is a brainwashing method that involves showing Alex violent films after he has been injected with a substance that makes him feel extremely ill, so that the violence and the feeling of sickness become linked in his mind. After two weeks of the treatment, Alex is so thoroughly conditioned that the injection is no longer necessary: If he so much as thinks a violent thought, he becomes extremely ill. As an unexpected side effect, hearing classical music provokes the same response as does violence because classical music is playing during many of many of the films he was shown. After his treatment, he is released, thoroughly harmless.

Theme - In A Clockwork Orange, the main theme is basically free will. Ludovico's Technique is a scientific method for taking moral choice away from criminals. After being conditioned, the person subjected to this treatment feels intense pain and nausea whenever he has a violent thought. The criminal is forced to be good. This is totalitarianism on the most intimate level. The criminal's own brain becomes a police state--as Alex puts it when he had a violent thought, "skorry [quick] as a shot came the sickness, like a detective that had been watching round a corner and now followed to make his grahzny [dirty] arrest (Part II, Chapter 7)." Ludovico's Technique makes Alex "as decent a lad as you would meet on a May morning, unvicious, unviolent...inclined to the kindly word and the helpful act (Part II, Chapter 7)," but his good actions are the result of his desire to avoid the ho

Some common words found in the essay are:
Ludovico's Technique, Pete Georgie, II Chapter, Clockwork Orange, Nadsat Talk, III Alex, Irony III, ludovico's technique, classical music, ii chapter, ii chapter 7, chapter 7, derived russian, nadsat talk, extremely ill, feeling sickness, clockwork orange, alex violent, ,

Approximate Word count = 1134
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels