Author Anthony Burgess example essay topic

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE 1. AUTHOR 2. TITLE 3. VOCABULARY 4. PLOT SUMMARY 5. CHARACTERS AND INTERPRETATION 1.

AUTHOR Anthony Burgess (born on Feb. 25, 1917, died on Nov. 25, 1993), who also published as John Burgess Wilson and as Joseph Kell, was a versatile essayist, linguist, translator, musician, and comic novelist whose inventive use of language and taste for parody reflected his interest in James Joyce, about whom he wrote in Re Joyce (1965). He is perhaps best known for his futuristic novel A Clockwork Orange (1962; film, 1971). Raised a Roman Catholic in Manchester, England, he was trained as a composer and frequently used musical forms in his fiction, such as Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974). After serving in the British Army in World War II, he became a teacher and education officer, first in England (1950-54) and then in the Far East (1954-59), the setting of Time for a Tiger (1956), his first published novel. Sent back to England with a supposedly fatal brain tumor, he wrote five books in a year. His many other books include such novels as The Right to an Answer (1960), Enderby Outside (1968), and MF (1971); fictional (Nothing Like the Sun, 1964) and factual (Shakespeare, 1970) biographies of Shakespeare; variations on the Oedipus legend; and critical studies of literature, such as Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence (1985).

The first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, was published in 1987.2. TITLE The title of the novella is a memorable and richly suggestive one adapted from a piece of slang: "As queer as a clockwork orange' is a Cockney expression meaning very queer indeed (the meaning can be, but is not necessarily, sexual). "Alex must be able to choose to be good; he must be an orange, capable of growth and sweetness, not a wound-up clockwork toy!' 3. VOCABULARY Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the book is its language.

Alex thinks and talks in the "nadsat' (teenage) vocabulary of the future. A doctor in the books explains it. "Odd bits of old rhyming slang,' he says. "A bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda.

Subliminal penetration. ' There are over 200 "nadsat' words, here some examples: horrors how – good devotchka- woman, girl mal chick- man, boy chelloveck-person, man, follow baboochka-old woman goody- breast slovos- words govoreeting-speaking of slovos glazzies-eyes rookers-arms, hands lit so-face rot-mouth gulliver-head gloomy-stupid oom ny-intelligent malenky-small rabbit-work cancers-cigarettes pretty polly-money Bog-god Burgess: "In a novel which takes brainwashing as its subject, I intend my own form of brainwashing, which is to force readers to use a Russian dictionary. The vocabulary of my space-age hooligans could be a mixture of Russian and demotic English, seasoned with rhyming slang and the gipsy's bolo. ' But Russian imports are not the only aspect of the language. There are also the repetitions ("creech creech creech ing away'), and the wonderfully laconic use of the word "like' ("Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate!' ) 4.

PLOT SUMMARY A Clockwork Orange stands as a great literary work, yet most copies weigh in in less than three hundred pages. Written by Anthony Burgess, it spans twenty one chapters (21 is the age at which children traditionally become adult, and it is the twenty-first chapter that Alex sees the light and puts the errors of youth behind him) 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'. 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 (an implicit allusion to Shakespeare's seven ages of a man). 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. The second book chronicles his time spent in prison, and it overlaps into the third book, primarily focusing on his treatment. He is treated in a strange manner, in a method that alters his mind with a combination of drugs and horrifying visuals.

He is changed to a point where the very thought of sex or violence (and even music) is enough to give him nausea. He reaches a stage where his humanity is in question, and Burgess is probing the fundamentals of moral choice and free will, essentially asking, "Is a person necessarily good if he is incapable of choosing evil?' The final portion of the book shows an Alex that is now a victim, unable to fight back against his many enemies from previous encounters (several years have passed). Everyone takes a swipe at him, and he is helpless to do anything. By the end, he learns, he has been given a new chance at life. The final chapter was originally cut in America and in the film, but it is really the most interesting of all. In it, after meeting the only droogs to remain loyal to him, now wed, he realizes that he, too, would like a wife, and possibly a child; and that he had changed and wanted to leave the 'tol chocking ways' behind.

But he must wonder, will his child follow the same path of self destruction? 'My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry for ella surrounded with mewing kosh kas, and I would not be able to really stop him.

And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Kosova Milk-bar) turning and turning and turning a von ny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers. ' Eric Swenson, Stanley Kubrick and a number of critics have found this last chapter too blandly optimistic: to end with Alex's cynical return to his violent ways ("I was cured all right') is, they say, tougher and more realistic. But this is to ignore the continuing pessimism that qualifies Burgess's happy ending. Alex may reach maturity, but his son will later have to pass through adolescence and all the mayhem in entails- "And so I would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round.

' There is no callow triumphalism here. Alex will have his descendants, and Burgess sees no means of stopping the cycle of adolescent violence, except with methods, whether aversion therapy, eugenics or other forms of socio-psychological programming, which are dehumanizing, morally unacceptable and a usurpation of God. 5. CHARACTERS AND INTERPRETATION Alex, the narrator and hero of the novella, is too brutal to be wholly sympathetic and too strong to be a victim. But like many rebel-hero, he exudes diabolic charm. One of Alex's charms is his love of music, which he plays full blast in his typically teenage bedroom.

What distinguishes Alex from most teenagers is that his tastes in music are classical: Bach, Mozart, above all Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony becomes the novel's dominant motif. It may reflect Burgess's own prejudices that, feeling some affection for his hero, he could not permit him to be a devotee of pop. Burgess even works himself into the story in the form of F. Alexander, the man whose wife is raped by Alex and his droogies. Alexander's name links him with Alex, whom he later meets again, by which time his wife has died, as a result, it seems, of the rape.

He is also the author of a book called "A Clockwork Orange'. This book doesn? t sound like Burgess?'s- it is, says Alex, "written in a very bezoomy like style, full of Ah and Oh and that cal? - but when Alexander speaks up for individual choice and freedom it is like his author?'s. There is the vision of a near-future society, as frighteningly persuasive, however small the canvas, as the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley: a youth culture in revolt, a corrupt police force, a government unable to govern. There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: Is it better for a man to choose to be bad than a man to be conditioned to be good? To which Burgess, not hedging his bets, answers clearly: yes. The government attempt to defeat criminals like Alex by depriving them of their minds – a liberal form of mindless – is no solution.

Youth, Burgess seems to be saying, must have its fling however wild. A well run state will moderate the dangers. But ultimately the only cure is age.