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/lit/ - Literature

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2603556 No.2603556 [Reply] [Original]

I don't get what the moral to the story is behind this. Is Burgess implying that the government shouldn't be in the business of regulating morality?

>> No.2603561

No, he's saying a person can't be rehabilitated unless they want to be rehabilitated.

Also he's saying that people can change, which makes his novel a great deal less memorable than the Kubrick version.

>> No.2603563

I really should read this book (despite their annoying fan following). I have a suspicion that there are important things being related about class structure in the U.K, something that really upsets me about the Brits.

>> No.2603564

No, he's saying that it's better to spend your life creating things rather than destroying them.

>> No.2603568

>>2603564

Where did you get that from?

>> No.2603575

I'd enjoy the story for what it is any try not to extract any deeper political message from it. Burgess' political views were pretty retarded, to say the least.

>> No.2603579

No, he's saying the Holocaust was a mistake.

>> No.2603584

>>2603561
I actually enjoy the infamous 21st chapter. Obviously, it probably wouldn't have translated well into the film version, but I think it's essential for the book.

>> No.2603593

>>2603579
No, he's saying that sometimes a boy is just a boy and a fish is just a fish.

>> No.2603605

>>2603575

>Burgess' political views were pretty retarded, to say the least.

Perhaps, but:

>I'd enjoy the story for what it is any try not to extract any deeper political message from it.

Every acclaimed, "classic" piece of fiction between 1950-1980 that contained elements of science fiction or science fantasy with dystopian/utopian settings is inherently and only political in its meaning. There is nothing else that a person can derive from A Clockwork Orange but its social commentary, and the same is invariably true for BNW, 1984, most of Vonnegut's collection, and every other writer who was trying to depict how scary things were in that era. If you're trying to read these novels for the characterization or the setting or flowery language, you're wasting your time; this, er...genre, you'll have to wait until it's highly stylized, in later decades.

Because honestly, writers the likes of Burgess care less about all those other things that make great novels then they care about delivering some overwrought message.

>> No.2603612

>>2603605
BNW and 1984 weren't written in those time-frames.

>> No.2603617

>>2603605

My bad on Brave New World.

I generally meant the post war period, though.

>> No.2603618

>>2603584

Sorry, anon, i disagree. The last chapter is trite shite

>> No.2603620

>>2603568
Beethoven, The Miracle of the Snowflake: creation
The Droogs: destruction

>> No.2603650

>>2603618

Yeah I have to agree.

>> No.2603674

>>2603618
But the last chapter gives us the difference between natural progression, and forced progression

Otherwise nothing really changes in the story

>> No.2603683

He's saying that people can change, but only if they want to. The movie says the complete opposite.

>> No.2603689

>>2603674

>But the last chapter gives us the difference between natural progression, and forced progression

This is true. The problem, of course, is how rapidly he is brought through that natural progression. If Burgess is making a point there, it's almost entirely an metaphor, and nothing else, because it doesn't reflect reality: hardened criminals spend their entire lives struggling with their impulses. It's not puberty.

That aside, Kubrick's version still allows us to note that forced progression isn't effective or worthwhile.

>> No.2603691

>>2603674
The last chapter certainly is important, but that doesn't absolve it from being sappy and rushed.

Imagine the story of Little Red Riding Hood. If it were handled in the same way A Clockwork Orange was, the second she enters the house with the wolf the story jumps twenty years forward and Red Riding Hood is reflecting on how she no longer talks to wolves she meets because she's much mature now.

>> No.2603707

>>2603691
>that Riding Hood metaphor
I don't think she willingly talked to wolves in the first place, she was tricked

>> No.2603713

>>2603691

Which reminds me: Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is a parable, and Burgess' is a bildungsroman (2nd time I've used that term in two days). The Previous does a better job of its role than the latter, regardless of how the viewer feels about the message.

>> No.2603718

>>2603713

I agree. The story works well as a parable.

>> No.2603723

>>2603707
there are so many different versions of the story, I'm sure it varies

>> No.2603729

>>2603691
>>2603713
Thank god, people who understand the last chapter vis-a-vis the film as is .

In ACWO Burgess produced the first great English work of literature with profound philosophical import since Milton's Paradise Lost (at least on the subject of evil), only up until that last chapter turning Alex into some sort of latter day Marlow, apostate bourgeois repenting his time spent in the Heart of Darkness.

>> No.2603745

So, what I'm getting is that people who don't like the last chapter just don't like the idea that Alex could suddenly grow tired of beating the shit out of people

>> No.2603749

>>2603745

Right. It disrupts the salience of the narrative.

>> No.2603755

>>2603749
>>2603745

I guess it depends if you believe Alex was just inherently evil or if he was just a bored teenager.