A Clockwork Orange

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 6

A Clockwork Orange

Today

- What did you think?

- Background

- Discussion questions

- Assignment

- Check together

What did you think of this book?

What is the plot of this film?

Review

- Read the review

- What is the main message of the book?

Controversial

- Read the article about the reassesment of this film.

- Should films that depict a lot of violence or nudity be banned?

 

Do you think films like this should be banned?
Why?

Yes

No

Burgess writes, “What I was trying to say was that it is better to be bad of one's own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing. When Alex has the power of choice, he chooses only violence. But, as his love of music shows, there are other areas of choice.”

What is the perspective/point of view for this story?

Where and when does a Clockwork Orange take place?

Background

During his visit to Leningrad, Burgess encountered the stilyagi, gangs of thuggish Russian teenagers. While Burgess was eating dinner at a restaurant one night, a group of bizarrely dressed teenagers pounded on the door. Burgess thought they were targeting him as a westerner, but the boys stepped aside graciously when he left and then resumed pounding. Burgess insists that he based nadsat—the invented slang of his teenage hooligans in A Clockwork Orange—on Russian for purely aesthetic reasons, but it seems likely that this startling experience influenced his portrayal of Alex and his gang. Along with English Teddy Boys, a youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s associated with American rock music, the Russian gangs provided a template for the hoodlums in AClockwork Orange.

Why do you think Burgess used Nadsat?

I think the use of Nadsat as slang or language of the use was nice

Agree

Disagree

Now you! 

- Try and complete your assignment

- We will discuss this together in 30 min.

- You can use the internet! 

Themes?

Morality

"It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions…" (2.3.13)

Free Will

Himself has grave doubts about it. I must confess I share those doubts. The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

Title

As Anthony Burgess writes in the introduction, the title refers to a person who "has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State."

In other words it stands for the "application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness." So, basically, it refers to a person who is robotic behaviorally but one that is, in all other respects, human. The title is significant not only because Burgess references it about, but also because it sums up what threatens our protagonist-narrator.

Anything else?

Fact check test...