A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess is a very strange author. He had a really weird vision of the future. I feel he did a great job describing his viewpoint. Anthony Burgess is not only a novelist, he also has written several plays, and even composed a few symphonies. He was born in 1917, and died in 1991. He first published "A Clockwork Orange" in the U.S. in 1962 and initially it had 20 chapters, one less than he had written. The version I read was reprinted in 1986 with that last, 21st chapter.

The main character, Alex, and his three friends thought they were indestructible. All they did every night was go around picking fights, drinking, and stealing. One night his friends sold him out and beat him up, leaving him to get caught by the police. Alex was wanted for many crimes that he had committed but they had never caught him before. After 2 years of jail they gave Alex the option to have an experimental treatment to get him out of jail early. The treatment was that they had to pump Alex full of drugs and show him movies of bad things to make him feel sick when he thought of committing illegal crimes. They released him after the treatment, only to get beat up even worse by his old enemies. He was put back into the hospital, they realized what they had done was wrong, and they changed him back to normal.

The time period the book was written in is 2010, which was very far in the future in 1962. The author must have thought that the world would have changed a lot more than it has because the world he wrote about is very different than how it really is and will be by 2010. Burgess wrote this book in a futuristic language he thought would fit the time period. The book was pretty hard to figure out at first because of this, but by using context clues it became easier after the first chapter.

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