Theme Of Free Will In A Clockwork Orange

        The second event that influenced the creation of his novel happened when Burgess and his wife took a trip to the Soviet Union and encountered a group of thugs who strangely maintained a kind of honor code (Contemporary). Burgess displays morality in Alex by not making him a common

A Clockwork Orange, a novel written by Anthony Burgess in the 1960’s takes place in dystopian future in London, England. The novel is about a fifteen year old nadsat (teenager) named Alex who along with his droogs (friends) commit violent acts of crime and opts to be bad over good. In time, Alex finds himself to be in an experiment by the government, making him unable to choose between good and evil, thus losing his ability of free will, and being a mere clockwork orange. A “clockwork orange” is a metaphor for Alex being controlled by the government, which makes him artificial because he is unable to make the decision of good verses evil for himself and is a subject to what others believe is right. In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

However, prisoners must trade away anything of value in order to survive. The prisoners sense for right and wrong become more contorted and Ellie comes to term that even “children [are] thrown into the flames” (32). Ellie accepts this because he sees it again and again with the angel faced pipel, Juliek and his violin, and his first “Blockälteste [who’s] removed” because he’s “too humane” (44) . These characters’ humanities makes them vulnerable because they hold onto their decency which they’re punished for with death which illuminating how survival cannot be insured when accompanied by morality. Instead, prisoners “[live] and [die] alone,” adapting however they can, as they just try to make it to liberation (110). They abandon their morals even killing for food or abandoning their families. The prisoners learn the price and effort required for morality in times of suffering, and abandoning the natural laws of humanity in order to

The government controls Alex’s free will by means of the Ludovico Technique, which makes Alex physically ill at the mere consideration of violent thoughts. When Alex is in the “staja” the Governor states that criminals “can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex…”. The Governor does not understand that criminal intent is not an unrestrained reaction, but the result of autonomy. The voice of reason in the prison is the prison Chaplin who questions the ethics of interfering with God’s gift of moral choice, “goodness comes from within….goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man”. Again through one of his characters, Burgess is stating that inhibiting a person’s free will is more evil than a person’s ability to choose evil over good. If one cannot choose, one ceases to be human and is exactly like a machine controlled by the government.

Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, a critically acclaimed masterstroke on the horrors of conditioning, is unfairly attacked for apparently gratuitous violence while it merely uses brutality, as well as linguistics and a contentious dénouement, as a vehicle for deeper themes.

Contextually, the time the novella was written there was a growing youth culture in UK. These youth groups were becoming increasingly violent and concerned for the rest of the society about safety and peace. Similarly, the extent of which violence is the part of life of the adolescent group in the novella is more clear in the nadsat lexicon. Therefore, one of the influences on Burgess was most likely the concerns, his and society’s, about these youth groups because the nadsat subculture resembles

Life is sustained by the struggling that occurs between good and evil. Take, for instance, the evening new which eradicates this fact of life. Unfortunately, the tendency for mankind to destroy rather than create is due to a certain amount of “original sin.” But there is a fundamental importance of moral choice, and that is what Burgess intends for us to learn about this free will aspect of life. When he added the controversial 21st chapter he solidified the books meaning by saying, “Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” is the signature question in Anthony Burgess’s novel, A Clockwork Novel that not only resonates with the moral identity of the anti-heroic protagonist, Alex, but also signifies the essential choice between free will that perpetrates evil and deterministic goodness that is forced and unreal. The prison chaplain and the writer F. Alexander voice the most controversial idea in the novel: man becomes ‘a clockwork orange’ when robbed of free will and tuned into a deterministic mechanism.

Gap of contexts allows us to compare the texts. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s 1486 essay Oration on the dignity of man, William Shakespeare’s 1605 compelling play King Lear, and Jane Smiley’s 1991 fictional novel A Thousand Acres all explore the notion of free will through both implicit and explicit values they share. It is through comparative study of texts how one can gain a deeper understanding of those texts.

Anthony Burgess's writing style in his most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, is different to say the least. This novel is praised for its ingenuity, although many are disturbed by Burgess's predictions for the future. However, for many, it is close to impossible to comprehend without outside help. This is because Burgess created a language specifically for this novel, called Nadsat. This Russian-based language forms conversations between the narrator, Alex, and his teenage, delinquent friends. There are many assumptions as to why Burgess chose to complicate A Clockwork Orange by filling it with the confusing Nadsat language. Some opinions are that the language shows A Clockwork Orange readers

A Clockwork Orange demonstrates the philosophically issues of free will and determinism through how the main character was treated in the movie. It also addresses important issues such as ethics, philosophy of the mind, free will and determinism, and the problem of perception. Philosophers such as John Hospers, B.F. Skinner, and Jean-Paul Sartre have different views on the issue through their theories of how individuals are or are not responsible for the free will choices that they make in life. The main character in the movie was a very violent , and reckless person. He participated in sinful acts such as being a gang member, raping women, being involved in fights, etc. These actions resulted in him being sent to prison and eventually being brainwashed into doing things out of his character. The three philosophers have very different interpretations of how the main character should have been dealt with and the reasonings behind his actions.

In the novel A Clockwork Orange, the author Anthony Burgess tells a story about a young man name Alex and his friends, every night they go around and start committing violent acts. In the novel Alex expresses his freedom of choice between good and evil. The freedom of choice is a decision that every person must make throughout his life in order to guide his actions and to take control of his own future. This Freedom of Choice, no matter what the outcome is, displays person power as an individual, and any efforts to control or influence this choice between good and evil will take way the person free will and enslave him. In this novel the author uses this symbolism through imagery. He shows that through the character of

The biggest battles in history is, has been, and always will be between good and evil, but where does evil originate? Is it something inherited, or is it something learned? Anthony Burgess attempts to answer this question in his dystopian fiction, A Clockwork Orange. The novel, written during the Cold War, is a reflection of Burgess’s viewpoint on Communism and its overall impact on society. Burgess “was appalled at the degree to which the communist state controlled people's lives” (Galens). He felt that when “a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man” (Burgess 63). Throughout the novel, Burgess tried to decide whether or not it is better to be forced to be good or choose to be evil. A Clockwork Orange shows that humans are inherently evil, but they have the potential to change as demonstrated with diction, use of imagery, and character development.

   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.

     A Clockwork Orange is a novel about moral choice and free will. Alex’s story shows what happens when an individual’s right to choose is robbed for the good of society. The first and last chapters place Alex in more or less the same physical situation but his ability to exercise free will leads him to diametrically opposite choices—good versus evil. The phrase, “what’s it going to be then, eh?,” echoes throughout the book; only at the end of the novel is the moral metamorphosis complete and Alex is finally able to answer the question, and by doing so affirms his freedom of choice. The capacity to choose freely is the attribute that distinguishes