A Clockwork Orange. The picture of an antihero

A Clockwork Orange. The picture of an antihero.

By Bruno Betancourt.

Radka Mikulaková, a student at the Masaryk University wrote this thesis where he explained rhe reasons and the context of the ultra-violence inside “A Clockwork Orange”. I really liked the points he gave, although I have to disagree with some. He states at the introduction of his work that his main goal is to prove that the point of the book is not and adoration of violence, but instead, a defense of individuality and free will. He also says that through the main character, Alex, we can fully comprehend Burgess´ mind and thoughts about the world, and we are able to fully understand the idea with knowing the political and social background of the book.

Mikulaková firstly talks about the context of the book, and how it is important to us in order to understand the book´s purpose and theme. First of all, the book was inspired by the fact that his wife got raped by American soldiers way back in 1944. This moment is obvious that changed the way Burgess saw the world, and how he thought things in general. He even wrote this scene in A Clockwork Orange. Them we see the Nadsat, which he invented while he lived in Leningrad. Anthony Burgess´ life is a direct cause of the violence reflected by the book, and this work shows us how he felt in those moments of desperation and hate.

Now, after talking about Burgess´ life, Radka writes specifically about the composition of the book, specifying us the time, the characters, language and motives. Well, I´ll try to be brief. The time is somewhere in a Londonish city around the 60´s, but those aren´t the real 60´s since they are kind of a futuristic 60´s.  Then, he states that characters could be divides into the “good” and the “bad”, but as he says, no one can be good nor bad since goodness and badness are an inseparable pair. The point when analyzing the characters is to realize their humanity, if it even exists. We see that Alex is the protagonist and the narrator, and he is presented as a brutal and barbaric person with no feelings whatsoever. He has his friends, who are also incredibly violent, and his parents, who don´t really care about him that much. Radka also writes about the importance of the Nadsat, and how it affects the story and the experience. Finally, he talks about motives. There are a bunch of them, and all of this are incredibly important to understand the storyline, and more importantly, the main character. We can say that Alex´s way to explain badness is the most important, since he chooses to be “bad” just because he wanted to. This explains free will and the development of humanism in himself, as well as the true worth of morality and values. We can see that the work is way more complex to understand than what everyone thinks it is, and that the ultra-violence reflected on it has actually something really reasonable behind it.

I really like how this writer analyzes the book, and I think that he is really right on his points. I have to say that I find the theme of the book way deeper than before, since through analyzing Alex and the whole context of the story, I get to understand Burgess´ point on society. The ultra-violence shown in the book isn´t necessarily ultra-violent when you compare it to the day-to-day society. I like the fact that we are able to show the importance of some moral things through written works, but I still think that humanity has future, and “A Clockwork Orange” isn´t a representation of the society´s future.