The story of A Clockwork Orange takes place in a wretched future of the author's invention, complete with a repressive government, violent street gangs, and a deadening mass culture. The narrator is the young protagonist, Alex, who tells his story in language peppered with "nadsat talk," the slang, derived mostly from Russian, used by the teenage hooligans of the novel. Alex, at the start of the novel, is a happy 15-year-old hoodlum who delights in rape, violence, thievery, and leading Dim, Pete, and Georgie, his little gang of teenage criminals. To amuse themselves, they break in one night to a cottage in the country, where they beat up the man they find inside and brutally rape his wife. The boys go on their way--this is an ordinary night for them--and back to their favorite hangout. At the bar, a woman breaks out into song, a little bit of opera. When Dim makes an obscene gesture toward her, Alex, a great lover of classical music, gives him a good punch. It seems to Dim and the others that autocratic little Alex is stepping beyond his rights as a leader, and they plan to betray him. The next time they go out, they break into the house of an old woman. When she calls the police, Dim whips Alex across the eyes with his chain and they all run away, leaving their former leader behind, blinded and helpless, for the police to catch. At the station, Alex is told that the old woman, who he had beaten in the process of robbing, died at the hospital.

 Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. But, after only two years there, he is chosen as an ideal first candidate for a new treatment called Ludovico's Technique. This is a brain-washing method that involves showing Alex violent films after he has been injected with a substance that makes him feel extremely ill, so that the violence and the feeling of sickness become linked in his mind. After two weeks of the treatment, Alex is so thoroughly conditioned that the injection is no longer necessary: If he so much as thinks a violent thought, he becomes extremely ill. As an unforeseen side effect, hearing classical music provokes in Alex the same response as does violence because classical music is on the soundtrack of many of the films he was shown. After his treatment, he is released, thoroughly harmless. The government boasts of Alex's treatment as a great victory for law and order and plans to implement it on a wide scale.

 When Alex is released, he has no idea what to do. The people he wronged in the past take their revenge on him; now they can hit him, and he is unable to hit back. Dim, his old friend, and Billyboy, an old enemy, now both policemen, drive him out into a field, beat him, and leave him. Trying to find someone to help him, Alex knocks at the door of a cottage. A man lets him in and very kindly gives him dinner and a room for the night. Alex recognizes the man as the writer he beat up and whose wife he raped, but the man does not recognize Alex, who wore a mask on that long-ago night. This writer, F. Alexander, is a political dissident. He and his friends come up with a plan to use Alex to make the repressive government look bad; they drive him to suicide by locking him in a room and piping classical music into it, so Alex is driven by the sick feeling to throw himself out the window. They plan to blame the government for the boy's death. The fall, however, does not kill Alex, and government psychologists reverse Ludovico's Technique on him while he is unconscious, so that, when he comes to, he is back to his old happy, violent self. He gets back to his old tricks for a while, with a new gang, but he's growing up and begins to get tired of his thug's life. At the end of the book, he starts thinking about settling down, marrying, and having a son.

MAIN CHARACTERS:
Alex-
Alex is a vicious malchick whole indulges in tolchocks, peeting milk-plus, and the occasional in-out-in-out on one of the more attractive young devotchkas of his city. Alex later has to watch films to cure him of his terrible violent attitude. He was cured alright.

Dim-
Dim is what you'd expect from his eemya, dim. He's a bit more gloopy than a malchick should be, but he weilds the tolchocks loud and strong with his oozy which he keeps as a sort of belt. Later he becomes a corrupt rozzy and is made to attempt to drown Alex under the influence of a former enemy, also a rozzy.

George-
George is a droog of Alex only to a point. You'll find that he wishes to have more power in the shaika, and wants to, at some point, overthrow Alex and be the leader of the group of droogs.

Pete-
Pete is a minor character until the 21st chapter. (If you have only 20 chapters, get the newer version with 21, its worth it!) He never turns on Alex, but they do meet after Alex's treatment with quite a shock to your humble narrator!

F. Alexander-
Anthony Burgess is this strange veck living in the cottage called "HOME" and writing his book, A Clockwork Orange about the government and how the youth is corrupted and the rozzies are malicious and all that cal. Alexander is visited twice by little Alex, on very different terms.
 
 
 

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE'S PHOTOS