Identity: In A Clockwork Orange
Identity is a common theme in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; it also takes many forms both physical and mental. The main character, Alex, is subject to much change/adaptation to his identity. At the start of the book he is a young 15 year old youth who love nothing but as he describes it a night of ‘ultra violence’ yet by the end of the novella after serious scrutiny and manipulation on behalf of the state Alex is somewhat transformed into somewhat of a role model to the youth in the dystopian world Burgess has created who despises violence and the very thought of it makes him sick, or does it? In this essay I am going to discuss: How Burgess employs language structure and from to create identity in a particular extract taken from the end of part 1 chapter 3.
Straight away you can see what type of person Alex is as I’ve mentioned he is 15 years old yet that doesn’t stop him and his ‘droogs’ stealing a car and driving around town ‘scaring old vecks’. The opening two lines of this extract really shows the dystopian society Alex lives in. You can see the dystopian element in the fact that of group of teenagers have decided to steal a car without a second thought for the consequences or the individual whose car it is. We also see Alex’s personality as you’d normally expect the youth to show respect to the older generation but no just in this extract but throughout the entire book we see Alex show a lack of respect to the older generation for example the drunk old man Alex and his droogs beat up outside the Duke of New York pub and the old vecks they are scaring at the start of this extract.
Throughout this extract the language and tone used by Alex changes to suit the current situation for example at the start of the extract Alex and his droogs and speaking in their youth language called Nadsat with the use of words such as ‘Gulliver’ meaning mouth and ‘lubbilubbing’ meaning sex. However when Alex knocks on the door of the...