Transcription of A Clockwork Orange - scasd.org
1 A Clockwork Orange Following is a list of discussion questions which you can use as writing prompts. You don t have address all of any of these prompts. They are simply this: a prompt to get your writing going. The questions have been taken, word-for-word from the following websites: 1. What is the nature of Alex s relationship with his parents, and how is this relationship important to the novel? 2. What is the significance of nadsat in the novel? 3. Trace the change that the government in A Clockwork Orange undergoes over the course of the novel. What does this change reflect about the designs of the State? 4. Discuss the relationship between Alex and F. Alexander. What importance does it have, with respect to the novel as a whole? 5. What is the significance of the title A Clockwork Orange ?
2 6. Given Alex s comparison, in the final chapter, of young people to wind-up toys, do you think that Alex considers his life in Part 1 to have truly been free? Do you consider it to have been truly free? 7. Describe the structure of A Clockwork Orange . What significance does that structure have for the novel as a whole? 8. Discuss the role of music in the novel. What relationship does it have to violence? What relationship does it have to the structure of the novel? 9. Based on the young people in the novel, how might you describe Burgess s attitude toward teenagers? 10. What's the point of all that, like, Russian slang and labor-union "O my brothers" stuff, along with the occasional Shakespearian lingo, as in, "what didst thou in thy mind intend?" 11. How might Burgess' story about Little Alex be a parody of the old-fashioned "conversion narrative," whereby the 'umble narrator goes from a state of sin to a state of belief?
3 12. What connections does the novel make between aesthetics (especially "high culture" art such as Alex's beloved Beethoven) and violence? How does it undercut the longstanding notion that art is necessarily an improving cultural force? 13. Alex is an adolescent--but in what sense might he be said to represent something archetypal about humanity, not just about youth? 14. How does Burgess characterize the various adults in this novel? To what extent are they responsible for the behavior of rascals like Alex, Dim, and Georgie Boy? 15. How, and how successfully, does Burgess' novel reassert the principle of Justice that seems to have been abandoned by the futuristic society and its governors? 16. To some degree Burgess' novel, like Orwell's 1984, is a "dystopian fiction." What similarities and differences do you find in the two texts' handling of the relationship between freedom and order, the individual and the collectivity?
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