Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange may be best known for the movie adaptation which came afterward. The novel has seen massive critical praise since its publication in 1962. This is a dystopian novel that imagines a future in which people are generally numbed by boredom and the general tedium of life under a repressive government, which largely dictates how people live their lives. The only escape for young people seems to be drug abuse and unrestrained violence. Such is the future imagined by Burgess in his novel.
The novel primarily foregrounds the problem of good and evil against the question of free will. Can we call someone a moral and ethical person if they have no choice but to act according to a prescribed set of actions? Or, is such a person little more than a machine, or a clockwork orange? Burgess has offered several explanations for the title, but suffice to beware that the image of an orange which is in fact a mechanical orange has all of the features of an orange, but is not actually an orange. Thus the guiding image of the novel should also guide our reading of the novel. Is our protagonist a “good” person when he has no choice in his actions?
The novel is told from the point of view of our main character who speaks in a strange slang. This can be difficult to follow, but most editions of the novel contain a dictionary of “nadsat” terms to help with reading.