Introduction / Andrew Bizwell 7

A Clockwork Orange
Part 1, Chapter 35
Part 2 127
Part 3 197

Editor's Note 273
Nadsat Glossary 289
Prologue to A Clockwork Orange: The Musical / Anthony Burgess 301
Epilogue: A Short Tale About the Young and the Green / Anthony Burgess 312

Essays, Journals, and Reviews
The Russians / Anthony Burgess 327
Clockwork Marmalade / Anthony Burgess 338
Excerpt from an unpublished interview with Anthony Burgess 348
Program Notes for "A Clockwork Orange 2004" / Anthony Burgess 357
Ludwig van, review of Maynard Solomon's Beethoven / Anthony Burgess 363
The Ecstatic Golden Crimson / Anthony Burgess 371
A Clockwork Orange / Kingsley Amis 384
The New Novel / Malcolm Bradbury 387
Horror Show / Christopher Riggs 389
All Life is One: The Clockwork Bible, or Mr. Enderby's Apocalypse / A.
S. Byatt 409
Review / Stanley Hedger Hyman 416
The Last Word on Violence / Anthony Burgess 430

From Anthony Burgess' 1961 typewritten manuscript for A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1961) 435

Commentary on the work 441
Translator's Note to the Augmented Edition 448
Author's Chronology 451

“No government should consider it a victory to turn respectable young people into wind-up machines.
“That’s something only a government that prides itself on oppression would do.”

A 20th-century work that questions the meaning of human free will and morality.
The original novel of Stanley Kubrick's film "A Clockwork Orange"

Expanded edition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of publication.
Editor's notes, a slang dictionary, an epilogue and several essays by Anthony Burgess, unpublished interviews, a 1961 typescript, and Malcolm Bradbury, A.
Includes reviews by authors such as S. Byatt.

ㆍSpeed ​​and energy that makes your hair stand on end.
It is a fascinating novel that deals with Orwell's vision of the future.
-The New York Times
ㆍAnthony Burgess's work may seem unpleasant and shocking, but it is an uncommon philosophical novel.
-"time"
ㆍI don't know any writer who uses language as masterfully as Burgess.
-William Burroughs
ㆍAnthony Burgess is a wonderful intellectual and a compassionate soul who embraces the world.
-John Updike

■ A thorough defense of human free will

The most important and controversial themes of this work recur in the speeches of the characters, the author Alexander and the prison priest.
Without individual choice and free will, humans would no longer be fully human, but would be nothing more than passive mechanical devices, like a wind-up orange.
This is true not only at the individual level but also in social change.
Any social decision made without the choice and consent of its members is fundamentally meaningless.
However, this unconditional affirmation of free will, intertwined with the protagonist Alex's freedom of indiscriminate violence, demands a more acute awareness of the problem.

By exaggerating the violence Alex commits and the harm he inflicts on the community, Burgess asks the fundamental question: "If we defend individual freedom, must we also recognize the freedom to commit violence?"
By establishing Alex as a character who defies all conventional wisdom about good and evil and the limits of freedom, Burgess attempts to shatter the conventional logic of freedom and ethics.
Alex commits a crime, but he is still a minor, only fifteen years old, and is unaware of the repercussions or implications of his actions.
They also have an aversion to the socially controlling nature of popular culture and are also fans of high culture.
As an immature character who is neither absolutely good nor evil, a perfect rebel who opposes all control and desires absolute freedom but is unaware of the limits of that freedom, Alex faithfully portrays the situation of modern people caught in ethical, cultural, and worldview self-contradiction.

For modern people, good and evil are not given a priori, whether they be religious virtues, community norms, or legal rules, and likewise, free will is not oriented toward either good or evil.
Burgess argues that when any coercion or oppression is applied here, that is, when it is not a purely individual choice, it cannot be acknowledged.


■ Insight into the Roots of Sin

The London of the future, the setting of the work, is a dark dystopia where crime runs rampant and the social control to combat it is as violent as the crime itself.
State institutions such as schools and prisons serve no purpose; they only serve to separate conformist and non-conformist individuals.
It is unclear whether Alex's violence and deviance were caused by this environment, but his experience in prison after his arrest demonstrates the futility of trying to change human nature through environmental factors.

The Ludovico treatment that Alex volunteers for is an extreme form of environmental determinism that seeks to control human criminality through artificial experimentation.
The subject loses his or her subjectivity as a human being and the possibility of self-change through his or her own choice.
For Burgess, the error of this kind of environmental determinism lies in the fact that the very idea of ​​seeking to trace the origins of evil presupposes the fiction of a kind of sterile human being, and the possibility of artificial interventions that could control or alter the complex and multifaceted life histories of human beings.
Burgess's paradoxical assertion, made through the prison priest's mouth, that "wouldn't a man who chooses evil be better than one who must accept the good that is forced upon him?" is a counter-question about what is more humane, and that on that basis we should pursue the possibility of improving the lives of individuals and the conditions of the community.

If so, the root of human sin lies in the fact that throughout human history, we have been increasingly deprived of the opportunity to question human truth, that is, to reflect on our own thoughts and actions, and this has become even more severe in modern times.
In the face of external authority and threats from myth, religion, and social mechanisms, the space for an individual to think and reflect freely has been diminishing.
In particular, as the mechanisms of social control become more sophisticated and the influence of mass media grows absolutely, it can be said that the position of humans as subjects who think and reflect has become narrower.
As the title suggests, modern people, who live passively with a clockwork mechanism, are losing the ability to reflect on themselves, and are also in danger of losing their sense of ethics and morality, and this condition soon becomes the root of sin.


■ Musical composition and innovative language

Burgess was a writer, a classical music enthusiast, and a composer.
One of his interests was integrating musical elements into literature, and A Clockwork Orange is the culmination of such efforts.
This work, which is structured in three parts, consists of seven chapters each.
And the latter half of Part 3 forms a counterpoint by formally repeating the first half of Part 1, but with a reversal in content.
This technique of reversal has an effect similar to the rondo form of a sonata or the ascent and descent of a symphony.
For example, in Part 1, Chapter 3, there is a scene where Alex sits in the Koroba Milk Bar and listens to a beautiful aria about death, and in Part 3, Chapter 5, he is tortured by the music until he attempts suicide.

In addition to the musical composition, the work's distinct personality is well expressed in the teenage slang and idiom, NADSAT, used by Alex and his friends.
The unique vocabulary in the work was created based on Russian and inspired by 'Cockney', a dialect spoken in the London area at the time.
He was so interested in language that he published books on linguistics, and he also devoted himself to research on the characteristics of everyday language and literary language.
In this work, the beer invented by Burgess reveals the social alienation, deviance, and exclusivity of Alex and his peers, and also has the effect of making the reader constantly infer the meaning of words based on context and phonetic similarity.
His view of language, which finds the characteristics of literary language in doubts and reflections on everyday language, is intertwined with the theme of his work, which is the exploration of humans as reflective subjects.