Summary
The night still young, the boys leave the Duke and spot
a drunken old man singing a sentimental song to himself. Alex instantly
detests him, and without speaking, the boys rough him up a bit.
When they finish, however, the man continues singing, and Dim has
to punch him in the mouth to quiet him. The old man starts complaining about
the state of the world. Interested, Alex stops attacking him and
asks the old man to go on. The man frantically expounds on how an
old man can’t live in this world anymore, because the young are
permitted to prey upon him. He concludes that he’s not afraid of the
boys, since he’s too drunk to feel their punches and too worthless to
care if he dies. The boys take this as permission to keep beating him,
which they do until the old man vomits blood.
The boys continue their walk. By the Municipal Power Plant, they
encounter another young thug named Billyboy with his five droogs.
Billyboy tosses aside a young girl he had been planning to rape,
and a fight ensues between the two gangs. Very quickly, Alex and
his droogs gain the upper hand, and they’re poised to pummel Billyboy
when they hear sirens. The gangs scatter, and Alex’s droogs duck
into an alleyway between flatblocks, the connected tenements that
line the town blocks. Here they catch their breath, lit by the moon
and the blue television screens of hundreds of apartments. Alex
notes that tonight the State is showing a worldcast program, meaning
a program broadcast globally. He also notes Dim’s rapt fascination
with the moon. Annoyed, Alex reminds Dim that there’s much to attend
to on the ground, and that now would be a good time to get a car.
Alex then leads the boys to the cinema, where they steal an almost-new
Durango 95.
After some time spent terrorizing pedestrians, Alex drives
his droogs into the countryside for what he calls “the old surprise
visit,” which involves breaking into a house and then beating and
possibly raping its occupants. They stop at a cottage, marked with
a sign that reads “HOME.” Alex knocks on the front door and asks
the woman who answers if he can use her phone and get a cup of water for
his ill friend. The woman replies that she doesn’t have a phone, but,
lulled by the courteous tone that Alex affects, she steps away from
the door to get him some water. Alex slips the chain off the door
and the four enter the house, donning their masks. Inside the house,
they find the woman and her husband, a writer. Though the husband
demands that the boys leave, the droogs pay little attention to
him. Alex and Dim look at the manuscript on his typewriter, and Georgie
and Pete head toward the kitchen to raid the pantry. Alex mockingly
reads aloud from the manuscript, titled “A Clockwork Orange,” before
tearing it to pieces. The writer lashes out angrily at Alex, but
Dim restrains him. Dim then beats the writer soundly, and as the
wife watches, horrified, it seems to Alex that her screams follow
the rhythm of Dim’s punching fists. Georgie and Pete return, laughing,
with their mouths and hands full of food. Disgusted, Alex orders
them to drop the food and hold the writer while he and Dim take
turns pinning down and raping the writer’s wife. Dim and Alex then
exchange places with Georgie and Pete. After they finish, the droogs
trash the house, stopping short just of letting Dim defecate on
the carpet. Alex orders them back out to the car, which they take back
to town.
Analysis
The chilling banality of Chapter 1’s concluding sentence—“Still,
the night was still very young”—assures us that the violence we
have already witnessed will continue in the coming chapters. Alex doesn’t
disappoint us in that regard, and in this chapter, he and his droogs
commit increasingly sadistic acts of cruelty. Alex remains wholly
unconcerned with the effects of his wickedness, and with what it
can get for him beyond unmitigated carnal pleasure. He seems to
have a disinterested attitude toward money, stealing it from the
corner store in Chapter 1, but not bothering to take any from the
writer’s house in Chapter 2. The hospitalizations and severe physical
injuries caused by his gang’s attacks seem of little consequence
to him. What truly matters to Alex is the visceral ecstasy he feels
when dealing a punch, slashing an enemy, or raping a woman. These
acts take on an aesthetic significance for him. In Alex’s hands,
violence becomes elegant and artistic. He describes his razor, for
example, as something he can “flash and shine artistic.” Likewise,
brutality brings out the rhythmic, colorful, and poetic linguist
in Alex. Violence heightens his powers of metaphor and description,
as he delightedly notes the pouring of blood (“in like red curtains”),
the color of a woman’s nipple, and the “four-in-a-bar” screaming
he hears during sex.
For Alex, violence represents a kind of artistic creation,
and he approaches acts of brutality like a composer or painter.
His verbal playfulness reflects this, as when, for example, he slyly
asks the writer’s wife to “Please let him have a cup of water? It’s
like a faint, you see.” The woman thinks that Alex’s friend is about
to pass out from thirst, while Alex implies that he’s “feinting,”
or deceiving, her in order to break into her house. Like a painter
or composer, Alex also has specific aesthetic ideas about his art
that he won’t compromise. He berates Georgie and Pete for their
vulgar laughing, and Dim for his attempt to defecate on the carpet.
In Alex’s eyes, these are crass gestures, and have as much place
at a beating as they would in a concert hall.
During the droogs’ nighttime rampage, a clearer picture
of A Clockwork Orange’s dystopian environment begins
to emerge. Certain elements of the novel refer explicitly to events
of the 1960s, when Burgess was writing the novella. The car that
the boys steal, for example, is a Durango 95, a real car manufactured
in Britain in the 1960s. Also, the drunken old man rambles about
putting men on the moon, a worldwide preoccupation at the time.
More important than these specific historical allusions, however,
are the ways in which Burgess satirizes the rise of both totalitarianism
and mass market culture, by combining elements from both communist
and capitalist societies into a single, fictional society, one which
is heavily State-run, and which exploits the controlling power of
both totalitarianism and popular culture to the fullest. The cinema
and the television worldcast are both government-sponsored entertainments,
as are found in communist countries. From the alleyway between the
flatblocks, Alex watches as the middle-class citizens dutifully
receive and consume this prescribed entertainment. Numbed, the people
are kept safely in their houses—a situation that not only ensures
the citizens’ security, but also assures the security of the State,
since a citizenry occupied by their television sets is unlikely to
be assembling with other citizens, planning rebellion and threatening
the State’s carefully constructed order.
