A Critical Analysis of 'a Clockwork Orange'

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A Critical analysis of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Pages 78-79) From this passage from chapter four of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess, the reader understands that the "vitamins" Alex believes he has received have something to do with his intensely bad reaction to the films. It appears that the doctors are conditioning or what I thought was brainwashing Alex to associate violence and criminality with dissatisfaction. Alex's free will to watch the films at the beginning is quickly undermined and, by the end of the chapter, he has no free will over either his reactions or the doctors' actions and therefore suffers the undeniable consequences of the video clips. I think that the choice of a war torture film and other such violent clips is not subsidiary; the doctors are sadistic torturers themselves, revealing in their aggressive examination on naive Alex. Their sarcastic remarks to the powerless victim are evocative of the sarcasm Alex and his gang used on the victims that they beat and sometimes raped. Whilst Alex is suffering from the movie clips, Doctor Brodsky simply says ‘Excellent, excellent, excellent.’ Here, the Doctor is clearly portraying how he does not wish to show any sympathy towards helpless Alex, as he did do to his previous victims. The detail in which Alex goes into whilst in distress is extremely intense and vivid. Alex says ‘I was sweating a malenky bit with the pain in my guts and a horrible thirst and my gulliver going throb throb throb.’ For me, the repetition of the word ‘and’ explains to the reader just how many feelings of pain and discontent Alex is going through. Words such as ‘sweating’ ‘guts’ and ‘thirst’ are all words that we associate with labour and hard work and that is exactly what Alex seems to be going through. The repetition of the word ‘throb’ suggests that Alex is trembling and having an emotional breakdown as a result of
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