A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he 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. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

‘What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.

this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop?

badness is of the self, the one, the you or me

But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?

Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.’

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence—the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.’

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek.

‘He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.’

‘Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog?’

‘Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?’

You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.’

wanting to cry and feeling like death was the only answer to everything. And that was it, that was what I viddied quite clear was the thing to do, but how to do it I did not properly know, never having thought of that before,

I might find some book on the best way of snuffing it with no pain. I thought of myself dead and how sorry everybody was going to be,

‘I want to snuff it,’ I said. ‘I’ve had it, that’s what it is. Life’s become too much for me.’

‘You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly—that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.’

‘But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.’

To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.’

Will not the Government itself now decide what is and what is not crime and pump out the life and guts and will of whoever sees fit to displease the Government?’

‘Stop treating me like a thing that’s like got to be just used. I’m not an idiot you can impose on,

One moment of pain, perhaps, and then sleep for ever and ever and ever.

I creeched out to the world: ‘Goodbye, goodbye, may Bog forgive you for a ruined life.’

It was like as though to get better I had had to get worse.

Power power, everybody like wants power.

now I felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plott, feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes.

being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.