A Clockwork Orange
Choice and free will are necessary to maintain humanity, both individually and communally; without them, man is no longer human but a "clockwork orange," a deterministic mechanism, as demonstrated in Anthony Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Orange. 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 no longer may he be called a man. Burgess himself has suggested that the basic issue of A Clockwork Orange deals with the idea of free will or choice. Critic Samuel Coale documents that Anthony Burgess declared: “Choice, choice is all that matters, and to impose the good is evil, to act evil is better than to have good imposed (92).” He adds, “I was merely trying to point out the very real danger, an imminent danger, that is, the State is taking on more and more control (92).” Finally he says that, “I lean toward anarchy; I hate the State (92).” This absolutist doctrine, which urges, “the defense of self, no matter how twisted it may be, and the c . . .
At the novel’s end, Alex is finally coming of age. You are being made sane, you are being made healthy (Burgess 108). The reader is made to feel as much a flailing victim of the author as he is a victim of time’s finite presence (Petix 124). ” He lies naked on his bed, surrounded by speakers, listening to Mozart or Beethoven while he daydreams of grinding his boot into the faces of men, or raping screaming girls, and at the music’s climax he has an orgasm (Rabinovitz 49). Devitis further goes on to add that while Alex’s world may not be made up of the traditional Roman Catholic good and evil, the two both exist in Alex’s cosmos (106). It is true that the government tries to make Alex totally good through conditioning; however, since it is a coerced goodness, against Alex’s will, total goodness is not achieved (Rabinovitz 49). In Part Two, when Alex is incarcerated in the prison system, his name is transformed into an identification number chosen by the state (Ray 134). In the last chapter of the novel, which strangely did not make it to some overseas destinations upon its initial printing, Burgess makes his final plea for the importance of free will. In the dramatic context of the novel, however, the idea of choice is not presented so schematically. ” If before Alex was a “clockwork orange,” subliminally conditioned by his society, now the irony is twofold. Instead, he is a “clockwork orange,” nothing more than a mechanical toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or the State. To Alex, music is “gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh (Burgess 36). ” On the surface, Alex is less psychologically distorted and biologically frustrated in his career of violence than those he terrorizes and those who seek to condition him. The issue of free will versus a mechanized thought process is widely debated in the novel.
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