In this article, the author presents some of the reasons of why Anthony Burgess decided to developed a new lexicon for his novel A Clockwork Orange, instead of using full English.
I think that it is very helpful to read it before the actual book, because apart from using some of the words of this new vocabulary, it explains very clearly the intention of Burgess of creating it; to give the option to the readers to distance themselves from the harshness of his writing.
Knowing this, the readers, including myself, will take this approach more seriously, because even though the topic of the book is cruel, it is not very distant of what we live daily, so the impact that it would have caused in us would have been really bad; that´s why the "cushion" was needed; to create a more friendly approach. But that is only one of the reasons of why Burgess created a new lexical.
Another one of the purposes of the nadsat used in the book is to create a clear division between characters. In the article it is explained as if the immature young people talked this language, and the older ones used English. This not only works to define which are the "troubled" characters, but to make them appear more sophisticated. That brings us to the next reason, esthetic vocabulary.
Because of the constant violence that the book refers to, it would have been very vulgar to talk in such ways, so Burgess preferred to use a language that did not refer to those terms, opting to use words that we would not normally know, so the reading would not be judged by its vocabulary. This automatically saves the book from being stereotyped by anyone.
Like those ones, the article exposes a lot of helpful information that makes you understand the meaning behind the nadsat. I think that Martin Nixon was able to analyze it and explain it very clearly, making the article useful to understand A Clockwork Orange at its fullest.
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