{"id":93,"date":"2010-12-07T12:27:09","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/2010\/12\/07\/violence-like-clockwork\/"},"modified":"2010-12-07T12:45:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:45:00","slug":"violence-like-clockwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/2010\/12\/07\/violence-like-clockwork\/","title":{"rendered":"Violence, like Clockwork"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"alex-orange.jpg\"
\nViolence is something that most sane people disagree with.\u00a0 Violence does not solve problems rather it creates them.\u00a0 Alex, in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange<\/em>, is a troubled teen who sees violence as a way of life.\u00a0 At first, a reader might think that Alex is a horrible human being with no moral code what-so-ever and thus the reader grows to hate Alex.\u00a0 Anthony Burgess, however, makes Alex a little bit friendlier through Alex's use of slang, Nadsat.\u00a0 This Nadsat is the way that Alex and his hoodlum friends speak.\u00a0 This slang is very juvenile with words like "tolchok" that translate to mean knife.\u00a0 This language gives the reader the sense that Alex and his "droogs" (gang members) are not 15 and 16 years old but five or six.\u00a0 This language has an interesting effect on the reader.\u00a0 Without the Nadsat, Alex would be perceived as a menace to society and readers would feel that he should be punished with a slow and painful death.\u00a0 But with the Nadsat, the reader sympathizes with Alex and feels that he just needs some guidance.\u00a0 The Nadsat makes the horrific violence seem like a game.\u00a0 Alex, while showing his love for violence in his participation of repulsive acts, is given pity by the reader because of Nadsat.\u00a0 Nonetheless, Alex is a cruel villain who shows no remorse for his actions.<\/p>\n

Alex loves violence and this love for violence is shown through his use of Nadsat.\u00a0 The greatest glory in violence for Alex is when he is attacking and mauling someone, not fighting competitively against him or her.\u00a0 Alex enjoys the slaughter, rape, and otherwise massacre of his victims.\u00a0 This infatuation with violence can be shown through his language during these attacks.\u00a0 When Alex and his gang find an older man with books under his arm, Alex and his gang immediately descend upon the old man.\u00a0 Alex shows his passion for violence when he recounts the scene beginning when "Dim yanked out his false zoobies (teeth), upper and lower.\u00a0 He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old bootcrush\u20ac\u00a6The old veck (guy) began to make sort of chumbling (mumbling) shooms (noises) –\u20ac\u02dcwuf waf wof'-so Georgie let go\u20ac\u00a6and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist\u20ac\u00a6and then Pete kicks him lovely in his pot (mouth)" (7).\u00a0\u00a0 The language that Alex uses is very entertaining and he is definitely having fun doing what he is doing.\u00a0 When people have fun doing things, they usually describe it with as much detail as possible, trying to relive the moment and allow the listeners to live the moment as well.\u00a0 The same holds true for Alex.\u00a0 He describes these acts with great detail, showing his pure enjoyment of the violence.<\/p>\n

His love for violence is also shown in his description of blood.\u00a0 Blood is the goal that Alex tries to reach each time he commits an act of violence.\u00a0 During the same scene when Alex attacks the old man, Georgie punches the man in the mouth and "then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.\u00a0 So all we did then was to pull his outer platties (clothes) off, stripping him down to his vest and long underpants" (7).\u00a0 Another instance of the glorification of blood is when Alex and company are robbing a store and to keep a woman from screaming, "she had to be tolchocked (hit) proper with one of those weights for the scales, and then a fair tap with a crowbar they had for opening the cases, and that brought the red out like an old friend (10).\u00a0 This quote shows how simplistic the horrid violence seems to the reader.\u00a0 When Alex says that the lady was hit with a "fair tap", he makes it seem like he really tapped her, when in fact, he bludgeoned her with it.\u00a0 Calling the blood "beautiful" and an "old friend" shows how obsessed Alex is with the blood.\u00a0 Nadsat glorifies the blood and also shows how important it is to Alex.\u00a0 The Nadsat also makes the violence seem like a game in which Alex is surely having fun.\u00a0 This game that Alex plays is certainly an awful one and exemplifies evil and cruelty in a most villainous form.<\/p>\n

Below is a clip from the 1971 film.
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Violence is something that most sane people disagree with.\u00a0 Violence does not solve problems rather it creates them.\u00a0 Alex, in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, is a troubled teen who sees violence as a way of life.\u00a0 At first, a reader might think that Alex is a horrible human being with no moral code what-so-ever … Continue reading Violence, like Clockwork<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1347,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogroll"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1347"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/psyc449\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}