A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian novel by the English writer Anthony Burgess, first published in 1962. Narrated by Alex, a fifteen-year-old gang leader in a near-future Britain, in a distinctive invented slang called Nadsat that blends English with Russian-derived vocabulary, the novel follows Alex and his gang of droogs through a night of what he calls ultra-violence, including brutal beatings, robbery and rape, committed for pure pleasure and set against Alex's own genuine, cultivated love of classical music, above all Beethoven. Betrayed by his gang and imprisoned for the murder of an elderly woman, Alex volunteers for an experimental state rehabilitation program, the Ludovico Technique, an aversion therapy that conditions him, through drugs and forced exposure to films of violence scored incidentally to classical music, to feel violent nausea at the thought of violence and, as an unintended side effect, at the sound of Beethoven itself, leaving him defenseless and effectively stripped of moral choice rather than genuinely reformed. The novel's British edition includes a final chapter, omitted from the American edition Burgess's publisher insisted on and from Stanley Kubrick's celebrated 1971 film adaptation, in which an older Alex, restored to his old violent capacities, gradually tires of violence of his own accord and begins to imagine an ordinary adult life, an ending Burgess intended as essential to the novel's central argument that true moral goodness requires the freedom to choose evil, and that a state which removes that choice, however violent the person, has committed a worse crime than the person it claims to cure.