The choice between good and evil is a decision every man must make
throughout his life in order to guide his actions and control his future.
This element of choice, no matter what the outcome, displays man's power as
an individual. Any efforts to control or influence this choice between
good and evil will in turn govern man's free will and enslave him. In the
novel A Clockwork Orange, the author uses symbolism through imagery, the
characterization of Alex, and the first person narrative point of view to
prove that without the ability to choose between good and evil, Man becomes
a slave.
The symbolism through imagery proves how Alex's ability to choose
between good and evil is his ascendancy over the innocent and the weak.
The first symbol is the music to which he listens and loves. It is the
only thing in Alex's life that he truly cares for. This music represents
the element of his choice and free will. When his ability of choice is
robbed in an attempt to better him, he loses his love for music in which he
exclaims, "And all the time the music got more and more gromky, like it
was all a deliberate torture, O my brothers . . . then I jumped"(131).
The music that represents his freedom to choose is now gone. He is left
without any reason to live. When he realizes that he is no longer a man
because of his absence of choice, Alex decides to end his life. The author
illustrates through Alex's violent actions, how they represent his abuse of
power through his freedom of choice. Alex...
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...al power. The demonstration of his free will and his loss of power
through the absence of choice is effectively accomplished through the use
of first person narration.
Throughout this story, choice has proven many aspects of power and
it's abuse. Through strong symbols in imagery, Alex's characterization,
and his point of view, the absence of choice is proven as the most
debilitating and most overlooked depravation of man's individual power. In
everyone's life, the struggle for power exists in all situations. The
decision between good and evil is the power that anyone must have as an
individual. The choice of which path to take is dependant on the person
and the situation, but the realization that both exist is a power unto
itself.
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...
Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." The Harper Anthology of Fiction. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 1052-1062.
The narrator’s prejudice makes him emotionally blind. His inability to see past Robert’s disability stops him from seeing the reality of any relationship or person in the story. And while he admits some things are simply beyond his understanding, he is unaware he is so completely blind to the reality of the world.
Alex seemed to find the love he didn’t get from his parents in his friends. Alex and his friends did a lot of damage to others, but of course they did it as a group. They beat up an old man who asked for change, they fought another group of people, they broke into a house and beat up the old man who lived there, then beat up his wife, killing her, but only after they raped her.
Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have a master ... For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil." You know the alternative: either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all-powerful.3
Good, is portrayed by God, and evil seems to be what fate has in store for the
Life in its ever-evolving glory seems at times to be nothing more than a serious of random events that lead us from one place to another. It takes many years of grace and wisdom to see that life is much more than that. Life is far bigger than any one person or group of people. Life is a lesson and sometimes lessons need to repeat. Life during the time of Walt Whitman was oddly and sadly similar to our very own time in some ways. Like us, Whitman dealt in "Leaves of Grass" with living in a nation during wartimes; and if you can say anything about war, it is that, it is never fast and never easy.
If all of these events did not happen, Alex would still be a static character. Through all of his courage, he found what he was looking for. He dug deep and went to the extremes that were not normal of himself. All of his work lead to his dynamic
Alexander Stowe is a twin, his brother is Aaron Stowe. Alex is an Unwanted, Aaron is a Wanted, and their parents are Necessaries. Alex is creative in a world where you can’t even see the entire sky, and military is the dream job for everyone and anyone. He should have been eliminated, just like all the unwanteds should have been. He instead comes upon Artimè, where he trains as a magical warrior- after a while. When he was still in basic training, and his friends were not, he got upset, he wants to be the leader, the one everyone looks up to.
This debate has produced two familiar interpretations of the Second Amendment. Advocates of stricter gun control laws have tended to stress that the amendment’s militia clause guarantees nothing to the individual and that it only protects the states’ rights to be able to maintain organized military units. These people argue that the Second Amendment was merely used to place the states’ organized military forces beyond the federal government’s power to be able to disarm them. This would guarantee that the states would always have sufficient force at their command to abolish federal restraints on their rights and to resist by arms if necessary. T...
The theme of Time to Come presents the mystery of life after death and calls attention to how vulnerable it’s victims are. Whitman begins his poem with the strong metaphor “ O, Death! a black and pierceless pall” (1). This bold statement allows the reader quickly realize that the work will somehow be connected to death, but in an insightful manner. The alliteration of “pierceless pall” emphasizes death’s ruthless approach. Whitman then describes death as a “mystery of fate” that " No eye may see, no mind may grasp” (3-4). This points out that death lingers in the future, essentially waiting to seize lives and nobody can know when th...
The lines that define good and evil are not written in black and white; these lines tend to blur allowing good and evil to intermingle with each another in a single human being.
After dinner the husband continues to test Robert and ask him if he would like some marijuana. The narrator is surprised when Robert accepts his offer to smoke. His first smoke was a little awkward because the narrator had to explain to Robert how to smoke it. After a couple puffs, the narrator is impressed on how well Robert smoked the marijuana. This is when the husband starts to see Robert as a person and not a blind man; he is starting to relate to Robert a little bit.
“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” (Eleanor Roosevelt). This is just one of the infinite examples of how human nature has been explored by so many different people. Each and every human is born with the capability of making their own choices. The decisions that they will make in the future will determine how evil they are viewed by others. Although one’s nature and nurture do affect their life, it is their own free will that determines whether or not they are evil.