Reading Order
A Clockwork Orange Reading Order
A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess is a dystopian novel narrated by Alex, a fifteen-year-old gang leader in a near-future England who speaks in Nadsat — a slang language of Burgess's invention that draws on Cockney rhyming slang, Russian loan words, and English morphology — and who with his 'droogs' conducts nightly rampages of ultra-violence: assault, rape, murder, robbery. Alex is caught and imprisoned, and in prison he undergoes a new aversion therapy called the Ludovico Technique, which conditions him to feel physical nausea when he contemplates violence or hears certain kinds of music, including Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (his favorite). Alex is released, incapable of violence or of the music he loved, and discovers that the life he has been made safe for is one he cannot endure. The novel's moral argument — that the capacity for evil, which is also the capacity for free choice, is a condition of humanity — was made most explicitly in the book's final chapter, which Burgess's American publisher omitted from early US editions, altering the novel's meaning significantly.
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A Clockwork Orange (1962)
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A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess·1962
A Clockwork Orange — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Nadsat and how do you read it?
Nadsat is the slang dialect that Alex and his droogs speak, invented by Burgess partly to date-proof the novel (contemporary slang dates immediately) and partly to create an immersive effect: the reader has to learn Nadsat the way one learns a language, by context, repetition, and inference, and this learning process is itself a formal enactment of Alex's perspective. Many Nadsat words are derived from Russian: 'horrorshow' from 'khorosho' (good), 'droog' from 'drug' (friend), 'devotchka' from 'devochka' (girl), 'mesto' from 'mesto' (place). Others are Cockney rhyming slang or simply invented. Burgess intended Nadsat to be decoded through reading rather than explained by a glossary, though most editions now include one. The effect of reading through Nadsat is to create a kind of complicity — the reader finds themselves thinking in Alex's language — that Burgess intended as a moral provocation.
What is the significance of the missing 21st chapter?
The novel has 21 chapters (three parts of seven chapters each), a structure that Burgess chose because 21 is the traditional age of majority in Britain — the age at which a person becomes fully adult. The 21st chapter, which Burgess's American publisher W. W. Norton omitted from US editions from 1962 until 1986, shows Alex at 18, beginning to outgrow his violent adolescence, finding the company of his friends boring and the lifestyle empty, and contemplating a future that includes children of his own. This chapter radically changes the moral of the novel: without it, the book ends with Alex reinstated in his violent ways and the Ludovico Technique seemingly defeated, suggesting an essentially nihilistic conclusion; with it, the novel argues that people change, that adolescent violence is a phase that can be grown through, and that the capacity for growth and change is what makes the state's attempt to condition Alex so wrong. Kubrick's film, based on the US edition, ends without the 21st chapter.
How does Kubrick's film differ from the novel?
Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, which made Alex into one of cinema's most iconic antiheroes (played by Malcolm McDowell), is largely faithful to the novel's plot and atmosphere but differs in several important ways. The most significant is the omission of the 21st chapter (since Kubrick worked from the American edition). Kubrick also, inevitably, translates Burgess's Nadsat-heavy prose narration into visual form, which changes the reader/viewer relationship to Alex significantly — the novel's first-person narration creates a kind of enforced intimacy and complicity that Kubrick's more distanced visual style partly replaces with stylized aesthetic pleasure. Burgess had a complex relationship to the film, acknowledging its power while feeling that it had 'overshadowed' the novel and that the omission of the final chapter had permanently distorted the novel's public reception.
What is the novel's argument about free will?
The novel's central argument, made explicitly by the prison chaplain in a key scene, is that a person made incapable of evil has also been made incapable of genuine goodness — that goodness which is compelled is not goodness at all but merely mechanical compliance, and that the state in conditioning Alex has made him 'a clockwork orange': something that appears to be organic and natural but is actually mechanical and determined. This is a traditional theological argument (derived from the Christian doctrine of free will as a condition of genuine virtue) applied to a dystopian political context. Burgess was a committed (if complicated) Catholic, and the novel's moral framework is substantially indebted to Catholic theology. The argument is not that Alex is right to commit violence but that the state's response — conditioning rather than genuine moral education or transformation — is itself a form of violence against the human.
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