Brad Schaffer 9 February 2004

General Psychology

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Meat Powder or Murder: Psychological Principles in A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange, takes place in the near future where the

city of London is understaffed with cops and overrun with gangs and crime. The main

characters, Alex and his doogies, Pete, Georgie, and Dim, are just one of these gangs. They

stage their nights events at a local place called the Korova Milkbar. A typical night for the gang

includes beating the elderly, raping women, and murdering anybody who gets in their way.

These events have been going on along time without anyone falling into the hand s of the police.

Their luck, however, doesnt last forever. One evening, Alex has an altercation with Dim

and Alex to punches him. The rest of the group thought it was inappropriate especially when

Alex claimed he had the right to punch Dim because he was the leader of the group. This left

Dim seeking revenge which he got during one nights routine attack. The group breaks into an

elderly ladies house and Alex beats her up. Shortly after, they heard the cops coming so Dim

waits outside and chains Alex as he comes running through the threshold. When Alex awakes

from his beating, he finds himself in the police station only to be told that he would be serving

fourteen years in prison because the women he attacked had perished.

After only serving two years of his sentence, Alex is given the opportunity to participate

in a new treatment called the Ludovico Technique. This technique involved taken the inmate

and forcing him to watch ultra violent movies directly after injecting them with a nausea-

inducing drug. The idea was that of classical conditioning. Alex later says of his treatment,

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that

it was better feeling to get hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like

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presented the other cheek.(Burgess, 121) Ludovicos treatment, a text-book example of

classical conditioning, had accomplished its task; it had effectively paired the stimulus, violence,

with an aversive response, nausea.

Upon the completion of the highly controversial program, Alex was released from prison

and thrown back into the real world. During his exit, the prison Chaplain spoke with him and

raised this question: What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of

goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the

good imposed on him? Even though Alex pays little attention to the Chaplin, this quotation

ends up being the main essence of the novel. In the introduction to the novel, Burgess points out

that if a man cant use his free will to choose between good and evil and can only be one hundred

percent good or one hundred percent evil, then he is clockwork orange, having 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 or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. (Burgess

ix)

At the beginning of the novel, the reader is bombarded with a foreign language called

Nadsat. At first this makes the novel very unclear and hard to read. However, after reading the

first chapter twice or maybe even three times, the reader begins to learn the new language. After

reading several chapters of the book, the Nadsat is almost second nature and becomes essential to

the book. The language, though confusing in the opening chapters, is necessary for several

reasons. The first was to force the reader to read in a more alert and interactive way than he

usually would. Secondly, the slang conveys the youth culture of the time in a very descriptive

manner. But, most importantly, it creates a buffer to distance the reader from the extreme

violence portrayed in the novel.

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By the end of the Novel, the reader feels compassion for their Hummble Narrator

(Burgess 180) and contempt towards the government even though fully knowing all of the

suffering that Alex had caused. Because of this genuine change in emotions, Burgess was able to

do an extremely good job of conveying his main concept about free will. He was able to plant

the question of who the biggest source of evil was in the novel? Was it the criminals or the

government? The criminals committed murder and rape, some of the worst crimes imaginable,

and the government had the right to hand down fitting punishments, but on the other side, the

government, by taking away mans free will, was acting as God. This is an even greater sin.

Many aspects of Burgess writing come from his life experiences. Burgess was born and

raised a Catholic in Manchester, England in 1917. He rebelled against the church as an

adolescent and never fully returned. However, his upbringing still largely influenced his novels

and was the basis of his thoughts of the problems of free will versus original sin. In 1961,

Burgess visited Leningrad. Before he went he brushed up on his Russian which influenced the

invention of his slang language, Nadsat, one year later during the writing of A Clockwork

Orange. Also while in the U.S.S.R., he caught a glimpse of heavily regulated every day life

under a repressive Communist government. This, along with his mainly negative political views

set up the setting for A Clockwork Orange. Finally, the character, Alex, was born one night

while he was eating dinner in a restaurant in Leningrad. A bunch of Russian hoodlums dressed

like teddy boys, began thrashing at the restaurant door (Encyclopedia Britannica Online).

Burgess idea for the Ludovico Technique spawned from behavioral psychology that

became popular in the mid-twentieth century by B.F. Skinner. Skinners methods were

successful on juvenile delinquents and retarded children. Skinner advocated the restriction of

individual freedoms to attain an ideal planned society. He researched how to modify behavior

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through systematized rewards and punishments. Burgess found these ideas revolting and their

spread threatening. He called Skinners works, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, One of the most

dangerous books ever written. (Davis 25) Skinners ideals are found throughout Alexs

treatment and are the reason for Alexs association of violence with debilitating sickness.

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Work Cited

"Anthony Burgess." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2004. Encyclopedia Britannica Premium

Service. 1 Feb. 2004 .

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange New York: Norton, 1986.

Davis, T.F., et. Al., O my brothers: reading the anti-ethics of the pseudo-family in

Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange. College Literature v. 29 no. 2 (Spring 2002) p.

19-36