A Clockwork Orange

Part 3 begins with the same question as Parts 1 and 2: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (151). Each time the question is asked, the meaning shifts slightly. In Part 1, the question was put to Alex’s gang: What kind of criminal trouble will they look for tonight? In Part 2, the question is put to Alex’s predicament: Will he stay locked up in jail or sign up for the experimental treatment? In Part 3, the question is also directed at Alex: How will his life play out in the wake of Ludovico’s Technique? Like the inverse of a morality tale, Alex begins his story in certainty—the arrogance of youth and the aggrandized belief in his own superiority—and ends with him lost, the world around him irrevocably changed.

Before he can decide what to do next, he is again paraded for the general public’s voyeuristic pleasure. There are cameras and interviews, the goal being to show the government’s success in reforming “criminal types.” Alex is objectified and forced to perform his degradation for the public: “The rest of the day had been very tiring, what with interviews […] and photographs being took flash flash flash and more like demonstrations of me folding up in the face of ultra-violence and all that embarrassing cal” (151). This public service campaign serves as a warning to other wayward youths.

The treatment facility releases him with little money and no direction. They completed their task and leave Alex to his own devices. As he soon discerns, the “freedom” he thinks he has earned is anything but. Nobody believes that he is reformed—and one could easily argue that he has not, in any true, moral sense of the word. He continues to reap the retribution of the violent seeds he once sowed. His parents do not want him to return to the family home, and it is difficult to blame them for this betrayal. Alex’s destruction of their peace of mind and his dismissal of their love and care cannot be easily forgotten. In addition, when they reject Alex, he reverts to his default emotion of self-pity: The treatment did not grow his ability to empathize with others. Thus, the cure is merely a band-aid covering a festering, moral wound. He responds the way an emotionally stunted teenager likely would: “Nobody wants or loves me. I’ve suffered and suffered and suffered and everybody wants me to go on suffering” (159). As he leaves the apartment, his final thought is of wanting his parents to suffer. He does not acknowledge his past deeds or the suffering he inflicted; he can only focus on his own suffering.

Alex’s sense of alienation is compounded because while he was away in prison, everything changed. The environment around his apartment building has been cleared, the vandalism erased: “there being no longer any dirty ballooning slovos from the rots of the Dignified Labourers [billboards], not any dirty parts of the body added to their naked plots by dirty-minded pencilling malchicks” (154). Alex also notes that the elevator­—always out of order before—is now working. It appears as if everything improved in his absence; the world is better off without Alex.

In addition, his favorite record store is irrevocably changed, and the proprietor is indifferent to the kind of music Alex enjoys (or used to enjoy). Instead of “old Andy [. . .] bald and very very thin” (160), there is a new clerk behind the counter who is little more than a teenager himself. Even worse, the music that Alex once passionately embraced—albeit in ways that stoked his worst, most violent impulses—now makes him sick and filled with stabbing pain: “It was that these doctor bratchnies had so fixed things that any music that was like for the emotions would make me sick just like viddying or wanting to do violence” (161). When he tries to find comfort in the Bible, he likewise gets ill. Alex has nowhere to turn for comfort, neither family nor art nor religion.

When Alex is attacked by the older man in the library, his reformation is again called into doubt. He can claim his punishment has been served, that he has “learned my lesson” (166), with repetitive vehemence, but this is not how society—represented by the older man and his cohorts—sees Alex. In fact, they do not even see him as human: “You lot should be exterminated. Like so many noisome pests” (167). Alex is dehumanized yet again by the allegedly civilized, older generation, who are supposedly on the side of Good. Alex understands it as an intergenerational conflict: “I could viddy what it was clear enough. It was old age having a go at youth, that’s what it was” (167). This misunderstanding between the generations is one of the hallmarks of the post-World War II era, as London emerged from the darkness of war into what was called the Swinging Sixties. In some ways, Alex represents—for better or worse—the future.

Finally, Alex’s disastrous encounter with Dim, the newly minted millicent, reinforces the undisputed notion that nobody believes in Alex’s reform—or, if they do, their desire for retribution outweighs their desire for reconciliation. Billyboy and Dim take Alex out of town to hide their “summary punishment” from the eyes of the citizens. As Billyboy puts it, “It is not right, not always, for lewdies in the town to viddy too much of our summary punishment. Streets must be kept clean in more than one way” (173). They do not want the city streets to run with Alex’s blood, and they do not want to be viewed as ultraviolent themselves. The statement can also be taken to imply that Alex is mere garbage to be swept from the clean streets.