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A Clockwork Orange


            The book "A Clock Orange", tells the story of a cruel adolescent of the near future and how he is reformed of his sadistic nature by a special conditioning treatment. The author Anthony Burgess creates a teen named Alex whose principle interests are rape, violence, and the music by Beethoven. Alex goes through many diverse phases in his life, expanding his maturity and level of thinking. He is greatly affected by freedom, which is the main theme of the novel. Burgess shows qualities of existentialism and elements of modern consciousness throughout the novel. To truly understand, one must look at the three major turning points in Alex's life. His early teenage years of violent rampage and sin, his reformation by the State and the outcomes this has on him.
             In the first part, Anthony Burgess constructs the character of Alex to be what society would like to ignore and get rid of. Alex is 15 years old and spends his nights terrorizing the public and engaging in "in-out in-out" with his "droogs". He gets evolved in gang fights, breaks into houses, robs stores, rapes girls, beats the elderly, takes drugs and eventually is convicted of murder. Burgess creates Alex to be a mixture of good and evil possibilities but with evil overpowering. As you read along, you begin to have a hatred for Alex and his sins through the vivid descriptions in the novel " we cracked into him lovely, smirking all over our listos-. You wonder why some one would commit such horrendous crimes. Then you find out that his evil is run by his own desire and free choice ".what I do I do because I like to do". This is a great example of existentialism; Alex has the free will to create himself. Soon Alex's freedom to do what he wants will be lost. .
             Eventually Alex's friends betray him by setting him up and getting him imprisoned. In this second part, Burgess makes the reader start to feel emotionally closer to him. You start to feel sorry for Alex when he writes " this is the really weepy and tragic part of the story beginning, my only friends, in Staja Number 84F".


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