A Clockwork Orange Research Paper

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Nothing Clockwork About This Orange The 1960s in Europe was a time focused on its youth. The parents of the 1960s generation had spent their young adult and teen years fighting against the Axis in World War II and wanted their kids to enjoy being young. This generation spent time making a name for themselves by reinventing music, shocking fashion norms, and causing trouble in their gangs. Anthony Burgess was interested by this generation of young adults and focused his chef d'oeuvre, A Clockwork Orange, on a shocking, violent gang of teens. Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was influenced by his wife's assault, his trips to the Soviet Union, and his fascination of the youth subculture. The influences on A Clockwork Orange began before Burgess …show more content…

In one of his classrooms in 1959, Burgess collapsed and was then misdiagnosed with a brain tumor that was predicted to kill him within a year. Burgess then began working on numerous novels including A Clockwork Orange. In 1961 he took his first of many trips to Leningrad which was a part of the Soviet Union at the time. During his trip, Burgess was “appalled at the degree to which the communist state controlled people's lives” (“A Clockwork Orange” 1), this led to the idea of free will being a major theme in his most famous novel. When Alex goes to jail, he is brainwashed into thinking the way the government wants him to think, giving him no control over his own mind which is very similar to the amount of control the Soviet Union had over its subjects. Burgess also dabbled in Russian language during his visits, Szeman points out the prevalence of Russian in Alex's made up language, “Burgess's most memorable novel, A Clockwork Orange, cannot be discussed without addressing its language 'nasdat', a combination of Russian, English, and slang...” (Szeman 295). An example of Russian in the novel is what Alex calls his gang, droogs, which is derived from the Russian word “drugi” meaning friends in

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