Sunday, March 6, 2016

The use and effects of fictional argot in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange

Mariana Valdés Flores
A01376836

I agree with the writer.
We have two options, to read the book with the glossary or without it. If you read the book without it, you would not be mad at Alex’s actions because you would not understand a thing, but if you use it to guide you, you will understand how a great but twisted this book is.
As the writer said, nadsat does not have a word for “love” because it is not a word that can characterize Alex’s actions, it is pretty obvious that Burgess did not invented words like this in nadsat, if you don’t know the concept of a word, that word won’t be in your vocabulary. Also I agree with him when he says that nadsat represents Alex’s immaturity because of the baby talk part of the language, and as he started to mature, he started to use less frequently his strange way to express (a combination between Russian, English and baby talk).

If Burgess had not invented nadsat, the story would have been a pretty messed up story. The writer said that the combination between Russian, English and baby talk makes that the story is not as violent as if it was written only in English, but as I was talking with my dad, he told me he saw the movie  a few years ago and that he disagree with this. Although he did not read the book, he said that the movie was pretty violent in spite of the vocabulary and that this was because Stanley Kubrick  (the director) was pretty good doing his job. In the article the writer said that the nadsat made that scenes like rape scenes were not so violent, but as I was commenting with my dad, he told me that although he did not understand anything, because of the nadsat, the movie reflected pretty much what Burgess wanted to say.



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