A Clockwork Orange Narrative Devices

“A Clockworck Orange” by Anthony Burges, is a novel that relates a terrible daydream of England in a future time where bands of adolescent hooligans ignore the main rules of living together in society, and every night take control of the town. The novel describes the different violent acts that Alex, a fifteen year old boy and the protagonist of the novel, carries out with his three “droogs” (friend-servants) against several random victims. Alex is betrayed by his friends and is caught in one of his acts and send to prison. Imprisoned he decides to escape in exchange of subjecting to the new “Ludovico Technique” which promises to eliminate all negative thoughts he or any other person could have. This technique however is proved to be particularly harmful to Alex’s life, impeding him to do nearly anything he likes or is amused with. Through this passage we can observe the narrative devices that the author employs in order to narrate this story.

This passage, written in part I chapter 2 from the novel, resumes the beginning and the end of one of the violent acts that Alex and his friends carry out. It summarizes how they sing and dance while they break and destroy the victims’ house. Old Dim, one of Alex’s friends stands on top of a table, where diner was orderly put and starts dancing and breaking everything: food, glasses, the mantelpiece and other ornaments. Meanwhile Alex throws around the papers of the book that one of the victims in the house was writing, “A Clockwork Orange”. The last sentence shows how a profound silence ends with the raping scenes they just performed. Nonetheless, unsatisfied, they decided to smash the last objects in the room, the typewriter, the lamp and a chair.

This passage is written at the beginning of the novel where the author, Anthony Burgess, describes different violent acts that Alex and his friends carry out. This scene takes place the same night they beat-up the grimy old drunk that was singing in the middle of the street, kicking him until he vomits blood. The same night the protagonist and his friends come upon a rival hooligan gang with which they fight with daggers and blades. Not only this, they decide to enter in a random house, destroy everything (as the passage illustrates) and beat and rape the members living inside it. Alex knocks on the door and invents a story asking the lady of the house to please let him in and use the telephone because one of his friends had an accident in the road. The woman lived with her husband and a young man, probably his son, which are terrified as Alex and his friends go inside and begin shouting as they destroy everything on their way. Alex finds a document, a sort of book the husband was writing, and without thinking it twice he starts breaking it apart. Alex later beats the man while singing “I’m singing in the rain…” and finally they all rape the woman one by one in front of her husband and son. As it is exposed in the passage all these scenes are written with different literary devices that make the scene more realistic and shocking.

Language plays and important role when reading “A Clockwork Orange”; what first catches our attention in the passage is the strange invented words that the author uses to describe certain things. These words come from an invented language called “nadsat” that Alex uses with his “droogs”, friends; a strange melange of Russian and English.