“The woman looked at the tree: the fruit would be good to eat; it was pleasing to

the eye and desirable for the knowledge it could give. So she took some and ate it;
she also gave some to her husband and he ate it. Then they eyes of both of them
were opened . . . and the Lord God called to man and said, “What’s it going to be,
eh?”
The answer is the choice of humanity: to seek after God, or to follow one’s own
natural desires. To question whether God exists and is the truth is irrelevant. He
is in the Bible and in the world of Alex. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden, the Lord
asks Burgess’ protagonist the same question Moses asked his Israelites: I have
given you the ability to choose. Choose for yourself this day whom you will serve.
(Joshua 24:15) Some may say that Alex’s choices were all determined by the society
he lived in, but they are no more than any of the choices that we, as humans
possessed of free will, make. At some point the responsibility has to lie with the
person making the choice, and not in the situation. The choices that Alex makes
compose his own version of the Bible’s salvation story: anarchic sinfulness of the
lawless man, sanctification that changes outward actions but not the heart within,
rebellion against this sanctification that leads to death, and final redemption
through love. His story is the Gospel according to Alex.
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“There is no one righteous; no, not one . . . All have swerved aside, all alike
have become debased.” (Romans 3:12)
Alex opens the novel as the perfect Kierkegardan aesthetic man. What’s it going to
be, eh? It’s going to be, for a painful while, Kierkegard’s first stage of man. The
aesthetic is above all concerned with his own individual existence, and the sensory
experiences he can obtain through that existence. That is Alex. After he rapes the
children he says, “I lay there dirty and nagoy and fair shagged and fagged on the
bed.” (46) Moreover, because the aesthetic cares only about himself, he enjoys his
solitude and secrecy. Alex, of course, is this in spades. He locks himself in his
room and removes himself from his family, “I gave him a straight dirty glazzy, as
to say mind his own and I’d mind mine.” (49) He is supremely
individualistic.Fittingly, so is everyone around him the millicents, the governor,
his parents there is no communion in this world because they do not share any
common belief or purpose. The reason is perhaps as simple as Alex says, “Badness is
of the self, the one, the you or on odd knockies . . . what I do I do because I
like to do.” (40) Later, when the government chooses to reform Alex, they follow
this same rule, not because individualism is wrong, but like Alex and F. Alexander,
they wish to create their aesthetic world where their own individualism is the only
one that exists. This is why Alex hurts people, not only because he enjoys
violence, but because those whom he hurts do not further his own individual
purpose. Human society is his society, and once anyone stops serving that society,
then he stops serving any purpose in life (23). Alex is the first modern
utilitarian killer. Alone, the aesthetic sits in moral darkness.
“In the beginning . . . darkness was over the surface of the deep.” (Genesis 1:1-2)
The darkness is the realm of the aesthetic man. All of Alex’s actions take place in
the dark, literally and figuratively. They travel by night then reside in the den
of iniquity, the Korona Milk Bar, “there was no law yet against pridding dome of
the new vesches which these used to put in the old moloko.” (1) Moreover, just as
Adam and Eve hid their sin from god with fig leaves, similarly Alex and his droogs
use darkness and disguise to hide from their god, the government. They do this with
words as well. Not only is Nadsat a degenerative symbol of the West’s Cold War
defeat, but it is an attempt by Alex to disguise his depravity. Instead of rape and
assault he says the “in-and-out” and “tolchok”. Like Adam and Eve’s fig leaves,
Alex’s darkness and disguise is necessary to create the beauty that he relishes.
“Now the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married
any of them they chose.” (Gen. 6:2)
This beauty is what the aesthetic man searches for. Like the angels, Alex sees
beauty and he takes it. When he finds a woman, he performs the old “in-and-out” on
anyone he pleases. When he fights with Billyboy’s gang, their battle is like a
waltz: thrust, parry, thrust, thrust, and first position again (17). When he fights
with his brothers, it is art in action, a dance “I counted odin, dva, tree, and
went ak, ak, ak . . . . So I swished . . . and I slashed . . . up, cross, cut.”
(54) Like the builders in Babel who tried to make a “tower that reaches to the
heavens” (Gen 11:3), so too does Alex want beauty just for his own selfish sake.
Nevertheless, it is a beauty that, while detestable, is understandable in light of
the world he lives in. The government has removed all the real beauty, art,
theatre, literature, from the world. Alex’s replacement is violence. It uses the
same human passions, stirring the same emotions as art does. This is why Alex
continually destroys books, because they compete with his grotesque definition of
beauty. “Then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.” Like the beauty of
Satan, under the cover of darkness, what appears to be beautiful is in fact a
“horrorshow”, a show that is similar to the violent symphonies he adores. He
describes his attacks as a masterpiece that he has composed and is orchestrating,
with the screams of his victims as the chords, and the death of Catwoman, the
crescendo. For the man who chooses to be a slave to his sin believes, the beauty is
found in the darkness: “Men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds
were evil.” (John 3:18-20)
“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things
rather than the Creator.” (Romans 1:25)
It is because of the violence in the orchestra music that Alex chooses Ludwig Van
as his god, “Music always sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like old
Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and
ptitsas creecing away in my ha ha power.” (42). But what Ludwig Van brings forth in
Alex is not complete satisfaction, but a promise of something greater, “the lovely
blissful tune about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven.” (46). The music is
orgasmic and is his way of attaining bliss, but this bliss is only a spark of true
ecstasy. Alex and his droogs search for through the old moloko, “Then the lights
started cracking like atomics . . . . and you were just going to get introduced to
old Bog or God, when it is all over. You came back to here and now whimpering sort
of.” (4) In seeking the transcendent experience they do seek God, even if Alex
refuses to accept that he is doing it, “You were not put on this earth just to get
in touch with God.” (4) It is as Paul says, “No one seeks God.” (Rom. 3:11). He is
the race of Israelites before the golden calf, exchanging God for something
present, temporary, and satisfying. Alex chooses the temporary over the eternal, a
choice that can be seen in his attack on HOME, an attack symbolic of the sinner’s
choice to rebel against heaven. At HOME, F. Alexander, whose life sadly mirrors
Burgess’, writes about man’s ability to choose God, “a man . . . capable of
sweetness . . . to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God.” (21).
But Alex has “exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worship(s) and serve(s)
created things.” (Rom. 1:25). He prefers the lie and this man’s truth serves no
purpose in his life.
“In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the
darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” (John 1:4-6)
The truth still exists however. Both Alex and the state attack a man in an alley
who sings of love, but both parties refuse to accept this light in the darkness
because it interferes with their aesthetic selves. Their worlds cannot have love,
because love means responsibility to others before yourself, the antagonist of the
aesthetic. Therefore, the man must be stopped. However, no matter how many times
they try to suppress, he sings the Song of Songs, the song of love. He sings until
Alex attacks him and his blood is spilt, “One of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side
with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood.” (John 19:33-34). He sings even
imprisoned among the real sinners, “They crucified him, along with the criminals
one on his right, the other on his left.” (Luke 23:33) His love is analogous to
God’s love in Christ, a love that in Part I, Alex is both seeking and resisting.
Nevertheless, even if Alex will not choose God, He will still reveal Himself to
him. The revelation is the only way to begin writing a gospel.
Once Alex is redeemed from his bondage in prison, or in Egypt, the process of
sanctification begins. The treatment he is given in accordance with Old Testament
law. If the Israelites do not follow God’s law then, “The Lord will send on you
curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are
destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking
him.” (Deut. 28:20). Similar destruction will happen to Alex if he does not abide
by the law that has been implanted in him, the sickness will overwhelm him. Alex is
forced to rise to Kierkegard’s second stage of life, the ethical man. He is a
clockwork, with all of his actions for the universal good, abiding by the socially
accepted moral principles. But the ethical man is still only another disguise for
Alex. His ethics are still selfish so he is still the aesthetic man. As the
chaplain himself says after Alex’s graduation performance, “He has no real choice,
has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of
self-abasement.” (126)They tell him he has made his choice and all this is a
consequence of his choice (127), but as the Israelites say to Moses as they wander
the desert, “If only we had died by the Lord ‘s hand in Egypt! There we sat around
pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this
desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” Alex knew no more about the choice
he made than the Israelites did. They both choose to have faith in what can save
them, but fail to understand what the object of their faith means. Moreover, there
is a difference between the two however: while God may have control over their
actions, he cannot control their thoughts. The state can, “I thought of killing a
fly and felt just that tiny bit sick.” (129) God orders the Israelites to be like
Him, but it is still within the realm of their lives to reject that choice, even if
it means accepting the punishment. Alex’s sanctification does not allow for choice,
and the only way he can choose otherwise, is through death. Fittingly, Alex’s lack
of freedom to choose is only recognised by himself and the Chaplain, the only
characters in the novella who believe in God. The Prison Charlie asks the inmates,
“You have the birthright to be free, why would you choose this prison over
freedom?” When Alex is “treated” the chaplain realises both the insincerity of the
procedure, and the removal of freedom, “He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also
to be a creature capable of moral choice.” (126) Alex is only prisoner who desires
this freedom and works hard towards the goal of obtaining it, “Sir, I have done my
best, have I not . . . I’ve tried, sir, haven’t I . . . how about this new like
treatment that gets you out of prison in no time at all.” (82) No one else in the
prison has as much desire as Alex does to be free to pursue that transcendent joy
that he has been searching for all his life. He does choose death because
sanctification that changes the outward actions of a man, and not his inward
motivations, is an unreliable and ultimately failing salvation. One of the reasons
he kills himself is “When I desire to do good, evil is right there with me.”
“Goodness is chosen” the chaplain philosophises, “When a man cannot choose, he
ceases to be a man.” (83) Therefore, what the doctors end up creating is a neutral
man, unable to love, unable to hate, unable to do good, unable to do evil. This is
precisely the man who God rejects because this man is not really His child, “You
are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are
lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16) The
created man has a choice. When that choice is not exercised, then he has nothing
more than lukewarm. This inhuman being that the state has created Alex into is an
angel, incapable of alternative unethical action. Perhaps Lucifer was one of these
inhuman beings, not having the ability to act on his evil instincts and still be a
part of what he knew of as life, he chose the eternal torment of hell instead. When
the chaplain wonders whether God would have preferred goodness over the choice, but
his answer lies in the Garden of Eden. If God did not want us to have a choice,
then there would have been no tree. Like Lucifer and the first humans, the ability
to choose is greater than enforced paradise. As Alex sails to the ground in his
suicide attempts, this is what he realises. best seen in Alex when, at the end of
the second part, the punishment for not abiding by the path of good is taken away
and he reverts to his natural state. Before this can happen, Alex is redeemed,
literally redeemed, freed from state bondage. The problem is that neither his first
redeemer, the government, who use him as their guinea-pig, nor his second savior,
F. Alexander, take any responsibility for Alex. He has to perform for his
redemption. These are the mechanisms behind a clockwork that does not believe in
grace. What they have robbed Alex of is something he slowly begins to realise in
his redemption: love. When he returns to his parents, he cannot admit that the
rejection is painful because now that he is a better person, he expects those
around him to treat him in the manner. It is a form of love that he seeks, one that
he did not before. Now he is dependent on the whim of others, he is forced to be a
part of a community, and he realises that the only way that he can survive in that
community is through love. But the law Alex is under does not require love, only
obedience. In his redemption, he is not forgiven in perfect love, but instead has
to pay, literally with the cats, for the wrongs he has committed. He seeks
forgiveness, but in a society that does not know how to love others, no one can
forgive him for what he has done. No one, of course, but perfect love.
Unfortunately, Alex is not under the law of perfect love. He is under one that does
seek to change the soul, but only the actions. Therefore the sins he has committed
have to be paid for with his own red, red krovvy. His parents reject him, he is
attacked by the elderly librarians, and he is betrayed again by his friends. And
when it appears that there is hope the F. Alexander, he turns and does the same to
Alex what Alex did to him. For all of these actions have at their heart, “An eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Revenge is not the way to redemption. The love
that Alex seeks is. IN LIBRARY WITH OLD MEN. When everything else has rejected him,
including his first three saviors, the symphony, the state, and F. Alexander, Alex
has nowhere else to turn to but this perfect love. The only thing left to save him
is the unity with God, the unity of a creature possessing free will, with a being
that can impose His laws on it a clockwork orange. He has rejected this route
before, but now his worldliness has failed him, and he turns to God or Bog and all
of His Holy Angels and Saints (141). When all the salvation rejections come
together, F. Alexander plays the symphony that initiates the government reaction in
him, he has no other choice but to jump out of the window intending to join them.
He is stopped, for two reasons. One is because it is not his free choice to be in
heaven. All it is, is a lack of any other choice, and what is that but another form
of the clockwork? It is precisely what the last two sections of the novel have been
about, when one chooses goodness because he has no other choice, his choice is not
truly good, and as with the apple in Eden, this enforced choice is again not what
God desires. Further, he cannot choose God in death if he hasn’t chosen Him yet in
life. Alex does not care about the rape and death of F. Alexander’s wife, the news
gives him the best night of sleep he has ever had. He has not been redeemed nor
asked for forgiveness. “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and
you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks
receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
(Luke 11:9-10) Alex does not knock, he expects the door to be opened. He still has
not chosen God. HOME summarises this paradox perfectly. When Alex returns to the
HOME of his former victim, the heaven he chose to rebel against, he expects to be
greeted with open arms as the prodigal Christian son, the model of Christian
forgiveness and love. Home is a place of peace, forgiveness, and contentment, and
Alex himself confesses, that is what he is in search for right now, “I must not ket
on, though, for I needed help and kindness now.” (154) However, Alex does not let
on the truth, does not confess his sins or ask for redemption. He lies about his
crimes, the technique, and refuses to take responsibility for his own actions.
Again, without choice, he cannot achieve redemption, “If we claim we are sinless,
we are self-deceived and thr truth is not in us . . . If we say we have committed
no sin, we make him out to be a liar, and His word has no place in us.” (1 John
1:8-10)Nor does F. Alexander, when he discovers Alex’s truth, offer forgiveness. He
is another Alex, incapable of forgiveness or redemption, another clockwork product
of this dark city. Further, he is just as much the aesthetic man as the state and
Alex himself asre, using Alex for his own personal Cause, first the article, then
his revenge. He is as incapable of love as Alex is. HOME cannot be attained without
either repentance on the sinner’s part leading to forgiveness on the host’s.
Perhaps if the truth had been told, this might have been done. It is not, however,
because Alex arrives HOME, yet again, in the darkness, the absence of light, the
absence of truth, the absence of love. Without this love, forgiveness is impossible
and the redemption is a failure.Therefore, he jumps out of the window,
looking for redemption, but cannot find it without either his own free choice or
without love, “whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1
John 4:8). He falls to the ground and “had this idea of my whole plot or body being
like empties of as it might be dirty water and then filled up again with clean.”
(172) This is his baptism, and the government, again replacing God, resurrects him
into his rebirth. They return conditional free will to him, on the condition that
he supports the government in their re-election ventures. With the return if his
freedom, his aesthetic self appreciating the evil in the world again, Alex signs
his soul over to the devil. Both he and the government lie to each other and
themselves, and God has no place in a life that lies. Therefore he is replaced in
Alex’s life yet again by the violent symphony of Ludwig Van and the glorious Ninth.
He has become an orange again, and as expected by all men with the freedom to
choose, it almost seems inevitable that, without love, he will choose evil, “God
has given them over to their vile desires, and the consequent degradation of their
bodies.” (Rom 1:24) So now, what is it going to be?
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I have no love, I am only a
resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. I may have faith enough to move mountains;
but if I have no love, I am nothing. I may give all I possess to the needy, I may
give my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I gain nothing from it.” (Romans
13:1-3)
After his numerous redemptions, the aesthetic Alex again sits in the Korona Milk
Bar and watches everyone around him still trying to reach heaven, “All round were
chellovecks well away on milk plus vellocet and synthemesc and drencrom and other
veshches which take you far far far away from this wicked and real world into the
land to viddy Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints.” All he does is watch and
participate in this same mindless repetitive game until he finally becomes bored
and hopeless. He does not buy the old women drinks, not because he hates the, but
because he has no desire to abuse them anymore in his own clever schemes. He looks
around and all he sees is the same degeneration that he has lived in his entire
life, with nothing here that can be considered worthy of aspiration. Mozart, he
says, did not write cal. He wrote heavenly music. This is the heaven that Alex has
been aspiring towards since the beginning of the novella. On of the differences
between this time and the first is that it is of his own free choice that he wants
it. The other one is that he chooses it in love. The irony of the government
removing Alex’s chance to be with God is that, in saving Alex’s life, they have
allowed him to realise his need for love and confession and forgiveness, even when
he has finally obtained everything that he has ever wanted. Instead of choosing God
because that was the only avenue left available to him, he now chooses God when he
has all avenues available to him and he realises that the only one he wants, is
love. It is through love that Alex achieves his true redemption. Like Baal did for
the Israelites, the god in which he has rested his new salvation, the “bolshy
orchestras (with) the violins and the trombones and kettledrums” is not enough for
him and he finds himself, “slooshying more like malenky romantic songs . . . just a
goloss and a piano.” There is no violence involved in his new taste in music. It is
a simple love that yearns, desires, and seeks. He wants to grow old surrounded by
love, “And he like gave this Georgina of his a like loving look and pressed one of
her rookers between his and she gave him on these looks back, O my brothers.” (188)
That inexpressible look, inexpressible even to the very loquacious Alex, is what he
wants to share. He dreams of a future prospered in love, really wondering what will
it be. He looks at a woman and sees her beauty, not as an object to be abused, but
as a fellow human to be cherished for love “always protects, always trusts, always
hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Cor. 13:7) Alex diagnoses his ailment correctly:
“There was something happening inside me.” He recognises the existence of human
love, and remembers the promise of the divine. His growth is a spiritual revival,
the inward transformation of the soul through love. The love he wants to discover
through God can be seen in his desire to not only have a wife, but to also share
the father-son bond that he has been denied so cruelly twice before in his life,
with his own father and with his surrogate father, F. Alexander. Alex wants to
experience what this love could be like, and it is this desire to experience
paternal love that can be translated into living in the love of the Father, Bog or
God. He has reached Kierkegard’s final stage of life: the religious man where the
single individual relates himself to the absolute, a private relationship with God.
The only way to enter that private relationship is through redemption in love, an
internal redemption, not the external force of Ludwig van or Ludovico. What the
government refuses to believe is that salvation is within human power, an idea that
Burgess refutes emphatically. If a murderer like Paul can be saved through love on
the road to Damascus, a child like Alex can be believed to undergo the same
salvation. And he does. So now what’s it going to be? It is going to be the
clockwork orange. God is the one endlessly turning the orange over and over in His
fists, but it is a turning which Alex freely accepts. Alex chooses to join this
endless clockworking of an orange under God’s law. All the gods make you into
clockwork oranges, Ludovico, Ludwig Van, F. Alexander, but the only successful one
that Alex is truly redeemed through is the one who fuses the clockwork with the
orange in love. Because he chooses that path instead, the path of the religious man
not the aesthetic man, he experiences a second rebirth, “something I would have to
get strted on, a new like chapter beginning.” (191) In his realization that this
life is not the one he wants, and confessing that aloud, he achieves his
redemption. He has groweth up, and has given up his youthful ways. Paul echoes this
in saying, “When perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I
talked like a child, I though like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became
a man, I put childish ways behind me.” (1 Cor. 13:10-11). He is an orange because
he finally chooses freely, but a clockwork because he has chosen to have his life
under the dominion of someone greater than himself. An orange because love is a
rebellion in this regime. A clockwork because love is a tradition as old as Adam
and Eve. An orange because chooses his own redemption. And a clockwork because he
chooses to abide by the laws that the redemption requires. Paul closes the book on
Alex with this: Love “is the end of the law and brings righteousness for everyone
who has faith.” (Rom. 10:4) This is the story of the true clockwork orange. The
redemption of perfect Christian. The Gospel according to Alex.