There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good?
Late December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle-aged man named Thomas Wharnton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him – all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back – that the King’s Peace might not be broken – by munching and dripping greyboys.
Oh, I’m dying,′ I like moaned. ‘Oh, I have a ghastly pain in my side. Appendicitis, it is. Ooooooh.’ ‘Appendy shitehouse,’ grumbled this veck.
That was everything. I’d done the lot now. And me still only fifteen.
Then there was another picture of some veck I thought I knew, and it was this Minister of the Inferior or Interior.
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? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.
Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog?’ And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: ‘Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?
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 displeasure the Government?
It was like as though to get better I had had to get worse.
All we know is that men move, men change, and that the sufferings they undergo – and will themselves to undergo – are both wrong and right.
A human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange.
It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.
Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.
But what was the matter with me these days was that I didn’t like care much. It was like something soft getting into me and I could not pony why. What I wanted these days I did not know.
I viddied this sloppy glass of beer I had on the table in front of me and felt like all vomity within, so I went ‘Aaaaah’ and poured all the frothy vonny cal all over the floor. One of the starry ptitsas said: ‘Waste not want not.’ I said:.
But you could viddy a like gleam in his glazzies, because now he would be taking over for this nochy. Power power, everybody like wants power.
So I was put into the bed and still felt bolnoy but could not sleep, but soon I started to feel that soon I might start to feel that I might soon start feeling just a malenky bit better.
Well, sir, it has come through on the pipes that a consignment of cocaine has arrived by irregular means and that a cell somewhere along Tier 5 is to be the centre of distribution.’ I made all that up as I went along, like I made up so many of these stories, but the prison charlie was very grateful, saying: ‘Good, good, good. I shall pass that on to Himself,’ this being what he called the Governor.
If the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nick Adams stories had been an undersized weed, asthmatic or phthisic, living out strong-man fantasies in the literature he produced, he would still be one of the great American writers.
Leave him alone, you grahzny bratchny,” and then he began the old whine about how nobody loved him.
Besame los yarblocos”- El lerdo.