A Clockwork Orange

Part 2 commences with the same phrase that begins the book: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (87). This time, it refers to something altogether different: Alex is in prison, stripped of his freedom and his worldly pleasures. He has already been imprisoned for two years when Part 2 starts, and it quickly becomes clear that incarceration has had little to no impact on Alex’s way of thinking. He is still self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, and self-absorbed.

For example, when he learns of Georgie’s death, he feels no sorrow or regret. Instead, he thinks that justice has been served: “The starry murderer had got off with Self Defence, as was really right and proper” (89). He follows this by doubling down on the justness of events when he thinks of his own predicament: “Georgie being killed, though it more than one year after me being caught by the millicents, it all seemed right and proper like Fate” (89). Alex’s lack of feeling is at the least narcissistic, if not sociopathic.

This coincides with his perspective on prison life. Alex does not identify with the other criminals in the prison, nor does he identify himself as a criminal despite everything that he freely admits to doing. He sets himself above and apart from his cohort: “They [the other prisoners] were a terrible grahzny lot really, and I didn’t enjoy being with them, O my brothers” (97). When the Ministry of the Interior singles him out for Ludovico’s Technique, he offends Alex by calling him a criminal. Alex responds indignantly, “I am not a common criminal, sir, and I am not unsavoury. The others may be unsavoury but I am not” (106). Alex’s self-importance and sense of exceptionality have not yet been quashed. His snitching—even when he must fabricate details—is part and parcel of his unabashed (if unwarranted) self-regard.

There is little evidence to suggest that prison has done anything other than hone his criminal capacities; with this, Burgess emphasizes that prisons are not places for reform but for the perpetuation of criminal mentalities. As the Minister of the Interior puts it, “Cram criminals together and see what happens. You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment” (105). Religion, too, is futile in the face of Alex’s sociopathic tendencies. He does not much like the New Testament, with its “preachy govoreeting,” but he certainly enjoys the Old Testament, “these starry yahoodies tolchocking each other and then peeting their Hebrew vino and getting on to the bed with their wives’ handmaidens, real horrorshow” (91). He finds solace in religious violence; if he cannot commit violence and rape, then at least he can read about it. When he listens to the music at the chapel, he goes so far as to fantasize about being one of the Romans who nailed Jesus to the cross.

The irony here is that Alex frequently portrays himself as a martyr. Betrayed by his droogs and wronged by the system, he indulges in self-pity and victimhood. When his cellmates give him up as the one who beat the new inmate to death, Alex bemoans their treachery: “‘Traitors and liars,’ because I could viddy it was all like two years before, when my so-called droogs had left me to the brutal rookers of the millicents. There was no trust anywhere in the world” (104). Again, he sees himself as the victim rather than the perpetrator.

Still, Alex also displays a kind of guilelessness that will eventually leave room for sympathy for his plight. He asks for the experimental treatment that will leave him a shell of a person; he is not simply chosen for it. Later, when he is approved for the treatment, he makes another credulous misjudgment. The Minister makes the ominous claim that Alex will be “transformed out of all recognition” (106), and Alex believes that “those hard slovos, brothers, were like the beginning of my freedom” (106). He is sorely mistaken, as he will soon discover. In addition, the fact that he trusts the doctors—he naively believes that the shots he receives before each treatment session are vitamins—reveals his youthful innocence.

The white of the building’s exterior, its rooms, and the uniforms in the treatment center—the word is repeated seven times in Chapter 3—not only reflects the sterile, hospital-like setting of Dr. Brodsky’s experiment but also serves to whitewash the authorities’ participation in this unproven procedure. Alex later calls the place “heaven,” not knowing these moments before he undergoes Ludovico’s Technique will be the last moments he is fully himself.