Synopsis
Set a few years in the future, the book follows the career of fifteen year old Alex (his last name is not given). His main pleasures in life are classical music, rape, and random acts of extreme violence ("ultraviolence" in Alex's idiom). Alex roams the streets at night with his gang, committing crimes for enjoyment, while no one attempts to stop them or the other gangs that ravage the community. He tells his story in a teenage slang called "Nadsat", which combines eighteenth-century Russian and English slang.Eventually Alex is incarcerated and "rehabilitated" by a programme of aversion therapy. However, the experiment is nothing more than a harsh exercise in behavioural conditioning that strips Alex of his free will. Though it renders him incapable of violence (even in self-defence), it also makes him unable to enjoy his favourite classical music, an unintended side effect.
The moral issue at stake within the book is that Alex is now "good", but his ability to decide this for himself has been taken from him; his "goodness" is as artificial as the clockwork orange of the book's title.
Eventually Alex falls afoul of some of his former victims, and the ensuing political fuss results in the removal by the state of his conditioning; he gleefully returns to his early habits but finds he has lost the taste for it, a more mature responsible unit of society. The 20th chapter ends the original American edition on a dark note, with Alex listening joyfully to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and eagerly anticipating his return to creating havoc.
It is at this point that early American editions of the book end, but there is a 21st chapter which was dropped at the time of US publication. Burgess says 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. It should be noted that the movie version which was directed by Stanley Kubrick follows the American version of the book, ending prior the events of the 21st chapter. Kubrick has claimed that he was unaware of the non-American version of the book at the time that he filmed the movie.
The line "What's it going to be then, eh?" recurs throughout the book, and the first chapter of each of the three parts begins with the line.
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