 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 ] Next Last |
Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression "As queer [i.e. strange] as a clockwork orange", but that he had found that other people read new meanings into it 1 . For instance, some believed that the title referred to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay for "person"). Burgess wrote in his later introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked", that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange -- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil." Rumour had it that Burgess had intended to name the work "A Clockwork Orang" and was hypercorrected to the form we know. In his essay "Clockwork oranges" 2 he says that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.
The book was inspired by an event in 1944Events World War II January January 4 The Battle of Monte Cassino begins. January 5 Murder of Danish playwright Kaj Munck January 17 British forces, in Italy, cross the Garigliano River. January 20 The Royal Air Force drops 2,300 tons of bombs on Berlin;, when Burgess' pregnant wife Lynn was robbed and beaten by four USThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in GI deserters in a London street, and suffered a miscarriage and chronic gynaecological problems 3 .
Set a few years in the future, the book follows the career of fifteen year old Alex. His main pleasures in life are classical musicThis article is about the broad genre of classical music in the Western musical tradition. For the period of music in the 18th century see Classical music era, for articles on classical music of non-Western cultures, see: List of classical music tradition, sex of all kinds, and random acts of extreme violenceViolence is a general term to describe behavior, usually deliberate, that causes or intends to cause injury to people, animals, or non-living objects. Violence is often associated with aggression. There are essentially two kinds of violence: random violen ("ultraviolence" in Alex's idiom). He tells his story in a teenage slang called " NadsatNadsat is a constructed set of slang invented by the linguist and novelist Anthony Burgess. Description Nadsat is a teen language spoken by Alex and his 'droogs' in the futuristic world of A Clockwork Orange''. It is not a written language: the sense that", which mixes RussianRussian /'ruski j'zk/) is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, inclu with English slang.
Eventually Alex is caught and "rehabilitated" by a program of aversion therapy, which, though rendering him incapable of violence (even in self-defence), also makes him unable to enjoy his favourite classical music as an unintended side effect.
The moral question of the book is that Alex is now " good", but his ability to choose this has been taken away from him; his "goodness" is as artificial as the clockwork orange of the title.
Eventually Alex falls foul of some of his former victims, and the political fuss that ensues results in the state removing his conditioning; he gleefully returns to his early habits but finds he has lost the taste for it. The 20th chapter of the American edition ends on a dark note, with Alex listening joyfully to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and eagerly anticipating his return to creating havoc.
At this point some editions of the book end, but there is a 21st chapter which was dropped at the time of US publication. Burgess claims that the original American publisher dropped his final chapter in an effort to make the book more depressing. The intended book was divided into three parts of 7 chapters each, which added up to be 21, a symbolic age at which a child earns his rights (when the novel was written). There is controversy as to whether the 21st chapter makes the book better or makes the book worse. In the 21st chapter, which takes place a few years after the 20th, we find Alex realising that his violent phase is over, but that it was inevitable. A few of the old characters are reincarnated as new friends of Alex. He thinks of starting a family, while thinking that his children will be as violent as he was, for a time.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |