Alex

I am personally very torn on my opinion of Alex. I feel like he is always playing devil’s advocate with me. When Alex is being mean and hurting and raping people, I don’t like him. I can’t stand his corruption. However, when Alex goes through the Ludovico process and can’t defend himself, I found that I partly wanted to sympathize with him and partly didn’t. In particular, the scene where the man who Alex beat up and who’s wife Alex raped is taking care of Alex, I wanted Alex to suffer. He didn’t deserve the kindness of that man.

But, from an analytical standpoint, perhaps that was one of the messages of the book. It is impossible to appear as a real person when one is, in fact, a clockwork orange. Now, the person may be deceptively human, but there will always be something slightly off about that person, and if it is not something about the person, it is how that person reacts to the world. I am a believer that a lot of who we are as people is represented not in our own actions, but in the reactions we cause in the world. When Alex is “cured,” he isn’t allowed to react to the world’s reactions towards him, so he appears fake to me.

Another reason that disliking Alex may prove a point is that the book itself is supposed to represent a dystopia. If I was able to appreciate and enjoy the characters and world that they lived in, then it probably wouldn’t be much of a dystopia at all.

The idea of dystopias also reminds me of 1984. Both books have a similar “clockwork orange” feel in that the main characters are always pawns of the system, no matter what they think. Even as the protagonist of 1984 seems have uncovered a secret, underground rebel group, it is all just a scheme by the government to maintain power. After receiving the Ludovico treatment, Alex becomes a tool of both opposing governmental parties. In both cases, the characters are essentially negligible in the scheme of things. They represent the hopelessness of an entire society.