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The importance of free will in the novel, Clockwork Orange
The importance of free will in the novel, Clockwork Orange
The importance of free will in the novel, Clockwork Orange
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Anthony Burgess integrates many social issues today between the Government and People into Clockwork Orange. Many of the issues that Alex faces along with the government are relatable in today’s society. Within the story Anthony Burgess teaches us how people act and how the government works in a more brutal way, The Clockwork Orange expresses this through free-will, maturity and karma, and treatment of people.
Free-will is a major part in the actions of this book. “The free will compels him to murder and rape, but also foster his esteem.” (LifeCharts). The opportunity to do as Alex wishes is what makes him to the crimes. It fuels him and in a way allows him to find himself. Alex is all about choices and he chooses to do the crime but also chooses to turn his life around. “Alex realizes that he benefits from living a normal life staying under the radar and it out-weighs the consequences of being a
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Before he didn’t understand the concept of free-will, but now that he does his morals are turning around. The government was trying to prevent this from happening because they govern their people by taking their free-will away from them causing them to do violent acts. When the people lose their free-will that’s how the government keeps the population down and everyone under their control. “A young thug who looks for violence rape and aggression ends himself in jail.” (Thill). The government uses this as a tactic to keep the cycle going. “In the Clockwork Orange, the anarchy quality of the society, indicates that pelagian liberals are in power.”(Novels). The Pelagian liberals control the people the whole time. Taking away their free-will the government brain washes the people. They brainwash the criminals to keep the population regulated and it instills the fear into the people, keeping the civilians always in fear not rebelling. The Liberals are always in control because they take away everyones
over evil and needed no treatment to help him do so. It is realized that in being unable to choose, one is not at liberty, and free will is taken away. Also if one has no say whether good or evil is chosen, it is of no importance because such a decision could be made by a machine. Alex was able to make two evolutions. He evolved from a machine into a human, and the evolved from a human choosing evil, to a human choosing good.
chosen to undergo a new “treatment” that the State has developed to “reform” criminals. After the State strips him of his choice to choose between good and evil, Alex can only do good now and even thinking of doing something bad makes him violently ill. Then, Alex is “rehabilitated” considered “rehabilitated”. Afterwards Alex is released where he encounters an “ex-droog” and one of his enemies, they beat him to a pulp and leave him out in the middle of nowhere. After coming to his senses, Alex makes his way to a house and in that house, right before Alex went to prison, h...
Stanley Kubrick was one of the first people to make great use of the extreme wide-angle lenses so tremendous that the lenses cause some sort of barrel distortion. For Example, in the A Clockwork Orange, is a great example of how Kubrick uses the wide-angle lenses. The lenses were used in both dolly handheld shots. The wide-angle lenses were very consistent and steady with the tone of the movie all together. His camerawork was something people should really resemble off of. The camerawork really makes a big
1. As I was reading the book Clockwork Orange, I felt like it deserved a 8 out of 10. I enjoyed the book because while I was reading it, I did not have such a clear image of all the rape, sex, and violence. Talking from personal experiences, I did not want to picture those images in my head. Finding out there was a movie of Clockwork Orange kind of scared me but also gave me excitement because I wanted to see how different the the book was from the movie. After viewing Clockwork Orange, I would rate it a 7 out of 10. I rated it a 7 out of 10 because the rape and violence was overused. In the beginning of the movie, there were non-stop sex and rape scenes. For example, when Alex and his goons fake their way into an emergency just so they could attack a older man and rape his wife, who later dies because of this accident. Toward the end of the movie, there was a lot of
The film, “A Clockwork Orange,” is, to me, an almost exact replica of today’s society. Basically, one kid, who seems to have come from a financially sound home and community, goes through about three stages--1. He violates the laws society has set forth to maintain order. 2. He is caught and punished for his crimes against society. 3. He feels remorse for his violence and sexually deviance (although, at the end of the film, he’s back to his old, delinquent self).
A Clockwork Orange can be characterized as a dystopian novella as a result of the world that Burgess created throughout the book. Alex’s world provides a future rendition of London if it were to continue going down the path it was on after World War II, one of a violent youth culture. This especially comes from the fact that his wife was beaten by a few Americans stationed in England during the war. This particular event’s influence on the novella can be seen through the various scenes where Alex and his “droogs” are seen sexually assaulting women. Burgess was also influenced by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Clockwork Orange experiences the Pelagian-Augustinian phases of rule found in the aforementioned books, respectively (Morris ). The Pelagian phase can be seen in the beginning of the novel where Alex and his “droogs” are essent...
The two works suggest that freedom of choice needs to be taken away for the greater good of society. In A Clockwork Orange, social safety and security are the driving forces behind removing freedom from the people, especially Alex, the main character. The start of the movie depicts the struggle of a violent youth that exercises free will in an oppressive but safe and stable society. Alex and his gang, termed droogs, symbolize free will as they attempt to liberate themselves from all government limitations. They indulge in vices shunned by the society such as rape and murder, and bring out the dark side of free will by expressing themselves against a society that encourages safety. Alex’s violent nature makes him a threat and in an attempt to impose order, the government forces Alex to be “transformed out of all recognition” (A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick). T...
All Alex knew was to be violent due to the failure and lack of family structure, the school system and the law. The lack of these assertive institutions Alex couldn’t properly generate proper moral values and social norms. According to Mead he analyzed that a child gets some sort of understanding of how to act properly by how others act toward the child. Later on in the child’s development he/she learns and understands “the generalized other”, values and cultural rules (textbook). Alex was never pressured into going to school, there is one scene where his mother wakes him and tells him to get ready for school and Alex tells her “he doesn’t feel like going today” and that was the end of it. With Alex missing out on school he never really self-aware and knowledgeable. His family is absent also. Again with Alex telling his mother he doesn’t feel like going to school and his mother just lets it go shows the carelessness of his parents. Alex can pretty much do whatever he wants when he wants. With their lack of parenting he never truly gained proper values and morals and instead he created his own by the morals and values his “droogs” know. He had many run in’s with the police even before he was
A Clockwork Orange and Never Let Me go are both set in a dystopian future. They both deal with a young protagonist trying to accept their fate in their respective societies. However. They are very different people, Alex Delarge is very impulsive and quick to anger person, Kathy H. is very empathetic and mild-mannered person. But they can still both be considered an “anti-hero”, they have that in common. Therefore both of these books share many themes, but since they were written in two different time periods, and the societies of these dystopian futures are very different, they have different approaches/views as to how to deal with the problems present in the novels.
"John (Anthony) Burgess Wilson." DISCovering Authors. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resources in Context. Web. 11 Mar. 2012.
At the start of A Clockwork Orange, you are introduced to Alex and his droogs. They are at a milkbar drinking milk-plus. Milk, plus types of drugs that enhance Alex and his droogs ultraviolence, which is the main backdrop to the story that leads to other psychological events. Drug addiction is a complex disorder that is compulsive and often uncontrollable. This is a chronic relapsing disorder, and treatment for drug addiction is about as effective as treatments for chronic medical conditions.
Amidst a population composed of perfectly conditioned automatons, is a picture of a society that is slowly rotting from within. Alex, the Faustian protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, and a sadistic and depraved gang leader, preys on the weak and the innocent. Although perhaps misguided, his conscientiousness of his evil nature indicates his capacity to understand morality and deny its practice. When society attempts to force goodness upon Alex, he becomes the victim. Through his innovative style, manifested by both the use of original language and satirical structure, British author Anthony Burgess presents in his novella A Clockwork Orange, the moral triumph of free will within the controlling hands of a totalitarian society.
Freedom and liberalism are catchwords that appear frequently in both philosophical and political rhetoric. A free man is able to choose his actions and his value system, to express his views and to develop his most authentic character. What this kind of idealistic liberalism seems to forget, however, is that liberty does not mean a better society, better life or humanistic values such as equality and justice. In his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), Anthony Burgess portrays an ultimately free individual and shows how a society cannot cope with the freedom which it in rhetoric so eagerly seeks to promote.
As teenagers deviate from the constraining grasp of their parents, they begin to establish their own identity through decisions; however, their development of self-identification is frequently hindered by manipulation of societal institutions such as: justice system, religion, and media. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, establishes the idea of freewill and how it is suppressed when Alex, the main protagonist, undergoes the manipulative Ludovico's technique, religious lectures, and social norms influenced by media- used to instill pain when Alex's desires violence/music and finding salvation, which is similar to the treatment of criminals in our society; ultimately utilized to mitigate crime, but also suppresses freewill through repercussions, fear, police officials, indelible ads, and the law. Therefore, American citizens are not privileged with the power of choice because the hindering paradox that exists in society: possessing the ability to consciously establish identity is entwined with manipulation, subliminally.
In this novel Alex shows his freedom of choice between good and evil, which is that, his superiority over the innocent and the weak. In the beginning of the novel he chooses to be evil, he shows us that by committing violence act like stealing, raping, and also murdering an innocent person which he got arrested for and put into prison for about 12 years. The amount violence he commits shows his abuse of power and his decisions toward evil. The violent acts that are described in this novel are very graphical and are intended to shock the reader but they also show that the suppression of others is wrong, because it is destructive to the natural rights of humans. Alex consistently chooses evil and violence to show his freedom of choice, ?Now I was ready for a bit of twenty-to-one . . . then I cracked this veck" pg 7. Alex beats, rapes, and robs the weak and ...