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So i decided to read a clockwork orange for the first time as part of my 'save Ambers brain from liquidation cause she's still not in school' effort but i am beyond annoyed at having to consult the glossary every other word.
Does anyone care to share any insight into this book that would maybe keep me inspired to keep up this tedious reading.please.....
looooooool
I recommend reading Myra Breackinridge by Gore Vidal instead...but it has to do with the subjugation of free will as a solution to random violence...
That sounds interesting but also something that will get me worked up and spouting off to my friends (who couldn't be more disinterested) for days lolQuote:
Originally Posted by nysprod
have you ever seen the movie?Quote:
Originally Posted by amberskyi
Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange over a period of about three weeks in 1962 when he was 45 years old. He was living on the south coast of the UK at a time when there were regular clashes in the nearby seaside town of Brighton between 'mods and rockers' and was thus interested in youth culture, particularly music, fashion, sex and violence -1962 is on the cusp of the 'swinging sixties' which really didn't get going until maybe 1963-64 propelled by the Beatles, Stones and youth fashion.
Burgess tells the story of a young man, a gang leader, his gangs acts of violence and criminality, his personal attraction to rape and violence (incuding the rape of two 10 year old girls), his obsession with Beethoven, and once arrested for murder and incarceration in prison, the beahvioural therapy he is subjected to which attempts to cure him of his need to express himself violently. Ultimately 'cured' Alex is then freed whereupon he meets people who had prevously been his victims and who then subject him to acts of violence much as he did to them. Ultimately, this produces a moment of realisation when Alex renounces violence and seeks a 'normal' life, having understood how morally bad his earlier life was.
The novel is concerned with alienated youth, which is why Burgess used a made-up language, drawing words from Russian; it is intended to distance you from him, and also reflect a modern dystopia in which layers of society don't communicate with each other, and seem to live in fear of each other, fears on which Alex plays.
The book is also a veiled attack on BF Skinner's behavioural psychology and the use of laboratory techniques to deal with mental illness.
Note that the first US editions did not include the concluding chapter of redemption, and that Stanley Kubrick's film deviates from the core of the book by expressing Kubrick's own concerns with the futility of change, although the film at the time was considered one of the most violent and was later withdrawn from circulation in the UK where Kubrick lived most of his life, the book is more extreme than the film.
I agree that made-up languages are a pain, even if they serve a purpose. I can't think of many anyway, although there are some 19th century novels which use dialects or regional accents that need a glossary.
A Clockwork Orange has been cited as one of those odd slang terms that people would use, as in He is as queer as a clockwork orange, which Burgess claims to have heard somewhere in London during the war.
Hope this helps.
Having not read the book but reading Stavros' good summary and seeing the movie I have to say I think Kubrick made a mistake. Easy for me to say but by comparison his ending seems cheap, melodramatic, and pessimistic. Was redemption too sunny a message for Kubrick? Yes, when the artifice of behavioral therapy is taken away maybe you have the character's prior malevolence, but Kubrick adds an unnecessary strain of pessimism with this take-away that people cannot change. He criticizes behaviorism and as an alternative suggests determinism (in some sense it borders on nihilism?).
What is the point of criticizing behaviorism if you then suggest that all other means of change are equally ineffective?
Burgess wanted his youthful central characters in A Clockwork Orange to speak in a slang as young people tend to do but he knew that any real slang would quickly date a novel that was supposed to be set in a dystopian future so, instead, he invented his own. He spoke several languages himself so he used that knowledge, particularly his knowledge of Russian, to create his own slang language ("Nadsat") for the novel.
He was also an admirer of James Joyce and aware of that writer's play with language to create a novel's own linguistic world.
No
Sorry
When they formulate "The Stavros App" for my google phone, I'm totally gonna download it ....even if it's not free.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
With my luck though...Apple will get it first...lol
Stavros....love that guy.
Supreb summary, Stavros. I was just thinking how difficult it would be to summarize Burgess' novel (especially since it's be 40 years since I cracked the cover), then read your post which is spot on.