Deep and Hard Questions

I've been pondering for the last three days on what I wanted to write about A Clockwork Orange. My mind's been in overdrive since I finished it Thursday night. Perhaps it's that the book coincided with the end of one year and the promising start of a new one; perhaps it's that I'm enjoying an unusual amount of solitude while my husband visits family in California; perhaps it's that I saw Black Swan yesterday and now I have to think about something else or I get the creeps. In any case, I'm struggling to find the right words to describe a novel that I didn't really like, and yet somehow loved. Yes, this one deservedly makes the Personal Best List.

Jake tries to help me collect my thoughts.

Burgess poses a tough problem with Alex's forced conversion to model behavior. Clearly he finds the government's power to snatch away free will to be more terrifying than Alex's brutal, destructive nature. In a sense, I understand that - the enormity of that power and the ability to inflict it even on those who do not need "reform" is quite disturbing. And yet...I'm not quite buying it either.

My version of the book included the "controversial" last chapter, which was not published in the original U.S. edition and thus not included in the Kubrick film's ending. Essentially the last chapter sees Alex grow out of his hedonistic ways and voluntary choose the straight and narrow, to the point that he now focuses his energies on finding a mate and perhaps starting a family of his own. Errr...wait. Wait. WAIT. So, murder, rape, beatings, etc. are just the product of youth's folly??? I'm sorry Mr. Burgess. I see that you might want to end the book on a more positive, upbeat note, but really, this ending is a cop out. It's much more unsettling, and I think realistic, to end the book with Chapter 20, wherein Alex is cured of his conditioning and able to terrorize the night once more.

Perhaps it's too American Puritan of me, but I want consequences when someone chooses to inflict harm on others. It's galling to me that Alex brutally murdered at least two people, raped children, and attacked old men, and the only punishment he may potentially suffer is having a child that will go through the same "stage" of violent behavior? I don't think he even feels remorse for what he's done, just boredom with it all and readiness to move on to something new. Murder is so old hat, you know.

Despite all of that, I liked the questions that the novel put forth. I like that it really made me think carefully about the nature of good and evil and the motivations for our actions. A Clockwork Orange reminded me that our free will is a terrible and wonderful gift. And so, with that, I shall leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the novel as spoken by the prison chaplain (or charlie):

"It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions…" (2.3.13)