Alex The Same Pain example essay topic

A Clockwork Orange stands as a great literary work, yet most copies weigh in at less than three hundred pages. Written by Anthony Burgess, it spans twenty one chapters and serves as a cult classic to this day. The first person story is told by Alex, a youth but of fifteen that spends his nights with his friends, or "droogs', terrorizing the public with their bits of "ultraviolence', and engaging in the old "in-out in-out'. He is a contradiction of characteristics, as he sips milk (moloko) laced with drugs, and listens to Beethoven while in the midst of raping a young girl. While the story sounds graphic, and in reality is, the book is not explicit. Part of this arises from the author's brilliant language system, nadsat, which in fact translates to "teenager'.

Nadsat is a combination of altered russian and odd bits of slang, and is constantly being spoken by Alex and his droogs. The other characters in the book, like his parents, do not speak nadsat, nor do they fully understand what it is that Alex speaks at times. The novella is split among three books, each of seven chapters. The first details his crimes. He beats the elderly, fights other gangs, with a razor knife "britva', no less, rapes girls, drinks much moloko, and finally, assaults a woman, inflicting mortal wounds. He is betrayed by his droogs and is sent to prison., where he stays for two years.

During those two years he had become the Prison Chaplain's pet. One part even told of Alex reading the Bible and daydreaming that he was a Roman soldier on the day of Jesus crucifixion. Anyway, after about two years, Alex hears of this new thing where a prisoner can be out and supposedly reformed within a week's time. So, he jumps to volunteer and is warned against it by the Chaplain.

Alex had no idea of what the treatment really was. So Alex is sent to the Reclamation Treatment building and is given a small room with a TV and nice accommodations. He was quite happy with this. The next day, before eating he was given a shot that was thought by him to help his appetite. After he finished dining, a man came to his room to wheel him to his daily treatment. He was brought to a large room with a seat in the middle of it, projectors, and a movie screen.

He liked all this until he was constrained to the chair by his arms and legs, and with his head fastened so that he could not turn it. After the instruments used to hold his eyelids open were in place, the treatment began. Many short films were then shown to him that contained brutal violence and gore and girls being raped. Normally, he wouldn t have minded all of this, but the shot given to him earlier began to kick in.

He began to feel horribly intense pain all over his body the entire time he was made to watch these movies. They even would play Beethoven, Alex's most beloved composer of all time. After having this treatment everyday for a week, he would be released. But not before being shown off publicly as evidence that the treatment worked. At the press conference was the head doctor of the treatments. He called out a big man who walked up to Alex and flicked his nose with his fingernail.

This, says Alex, caused me to reach for my cut-throat britva. (his knife which was returned to him upon his release). But as Alex thought of the man lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, the terrible pain welled up inside of him and the only thing to keep the pain away was to not think of violence or harming anyone else. So, trying to escape the pain, he asked if there was anything he could do to help the man. The man made him lick his boots. The point of this Reclamation Treatment was that any thought towards violence would cause the subject intense pain, which was, in turn, caused through association with the shots given to him and the things he was made to see while under the influence of the shots. The treated would do anything to make the pain go away, so they would be nice and think good thoughts about the person they wanted to harm so the pain would stop.

So, any inclination towards evil would then, paradoxically, become an inclination towards good. But the Prison Chaplain was at the press conference and asked, Choice. He has no real choice has he? He ceases to be a wrongdoer, but he ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice. After the press conference, Alex is then released to a world in which he finds many things have changed. His parents now have a new person in their lives that they consider their son.

The hobo and Library man both exact revenge on him for the beatings he gave them two years ago, but he is incapable of fighting back. When trying to get help from two policemen, he finds that they are his friends who got him arrested two years earlier. They take him out to a secluded place and proceed to jump him and almost drown him. He then crawls to a nearby house with gates that are labeled Home.

The writer doesn t recognize Alex right off since Alex was wearing a mask that night, but through several slip-ups Alex reveals himself. The writer calls friends who come by and take him to an upstairs apartment and blast Beethoven throughout the place. They had read of the treatment in the newspapers and remembered something about Beethoven. Hearing Beethoven caused Alex the same pain that violence caused him through association with the shots given to him. So, he jumps out of the window. The story is finished as he wakes up in a hospital to find that he is cured.

The public heard of the events that occurred to him after being released and demanded that the treatment be reversed. But there is a last chapter that was left out of the movie and the earlier American printings in which Alex is hanging out with new hoodlums after being cured, but realizes that something is missing. He goes for a walk, and meets the third of his friends who set him up so long ago, and finds out that he has been married and is now living a happy life. This is what has been missing in Alex.

The need to settle down falls over him, and in essence he grows up.