Alex DeLarge
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Alex is the narrator and antihero of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange and the movie adaptation, in which he is played by Malcolm McDowell. In the novel he has no surname, but in the film when he enters prison he gives his name as Alex DeLarge.
Alex DeLarge, as played by McDowell, was named the 12th greatest movie villain of all time in the American Film Institute's "100 Years... 100 Heroes & Villains".
Alex is portrayed as a sociopath who robs, rapes, and ultimately murders without a twinge of conscience, even though he knows intellectually that this sort of behavior is wrong. He says that "you can't have a society with everybody behaving in my manner of the night." He professes to be puzzled by the motivations of those who wish to reform him and others like him, saying that he would never interfere with their desire to be good; it's just that he "goes to the other shop."
He speaks Nadsat most of the time, an invented slang based on English and Russian words, as well as borrowings from bits of Romany speech, the Bible and schoolboy colloquialisms. He likes milk spiked with various stimulants ("milk plus") or hallucinogens ("synthemesc"). The book goes into much greater detail about the nature of the drug use, describing how the customers at the Korova Milk Bar go away "into the Land." Alex is very fond of classical music, particularly Beethoven, or, as he calls him, "lovely lovely Ludwig van". While listening to this music, he fantasizes and becomes sexually aroused about endless rampages of torture and slaughter, to the point of orgasm.
At the beginning of the novel, Alex is fifteen years old and already a veteran of several stays in institutions for juvenile delinquents. (In the film, to minimize controversy, Alex is portrayed as somewhat older.) Alex lives with his parents in a bleak, poorly maintained and heavily vandalized block of flats in an unnamed city in a near-future Socialist England.
He is the leader of a gang of "droogs" (friends) — Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Although the youngest of the foursome, he is also the most intelligent and fearless, and the one who comes up with most of the ideas. Georgie, who resents his high-handed ways, sets him up to be arrested at the site of one of the gang's crimes, and he is sent to prison for murder. The book mentions that Alex eventually finds out Georgie was killed during a failed robbery.
Alex is sentenced to "14 years in Staja 84F," "Staja" being the abbreviation for "State Jail." Alex does not follow the convict code of ethics — he betrays a fellow prisoner's escape plans to the prison chaplain, knowing that he will report it to the warden. He curries the chaplain's favor by reading the Bible (using it to fantasize about being one of the crueler Roman emperors, or one of the soldiers who tortured Jesus). He is selected for the "Ludovico Treatment" by the Interior Minister of a rather ominous new government. In the book, the selection is precipitated when Alex and his cellmates stomp an obnoxious fellow prisoner to death and Alex incurs all the blame.
The treatment, a form of aversion therapy, involves injecting him with a drug that upsets his stomach and then showing him films of rape and violence, so that he will associate such acts with pain and become sick at the thought of hurting anyone. While being forced to watch footage from a Nazi concentration camp, Alex notices the soundtrack — his favorite music, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. From here on out, he associates Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with violence and can't hear it (or any other classical music) without getting sick.
After the Ludovico Treatment, Alex's sentence is commuted to time served, and he is released. However, the treatment worked too well — he can't defend himself even when necessary. He is rejected by his parents, who have rented out his room and turned over his belonging to the police pursuant to a new law compensating victims. Walking along what appears to be the Thames Embankment, he is nearly beaten to death by a homeless man he had victimized before going to prison. When two policemen break it up, they turn out to be none other than Dim and Billy Boy, the former leader of a rival gang, (in the movie, his former droog, Georgie) who brutalize him further and leave him to die. Every time Alex tries to defend himself, he is brought to his knees with pain and nausea.
Disoriented with pain, Alex stumbles to the nearest house, pleading for help. The owner, a wheelchair-bound writer whom the government calls "subversive," recognizes Alex from the newspapers and wants to help him. Alex recognizes the writer as well — as a man he and his friends had once beaten nearly to death (hence his paralysis) and forced to watch as they raped his wife, who later died of an illness possibly brought on by the assault. The writer doesn't make the connection at first, but realizes who he is dealing with when he overhears Alex in the bath singing the theme song from the Gene Kelly musical Singin' in the Rain — the very same song the he had sung while kicking him mercilessly.
Seeking revenge, the writer drugs Alex, locks him in a room, forcing him to listen to the Ninth Symphony, the effects of which Alex had mentioned in conversation. Wracked with pain, Alex tries to commit suicide by jumping out the window — only to awake in a hospital, where the effects of the Treatment are being reversed. His parents arrive to welcome him back home and the Minister of the Interior, smarting from the bad publicity Alex's case has brought, offers him a government job. He is his old ultraviolent self again: "I was cured all right." (This is the end of the film, and of the American edition of the novel as well).
The final chapter of the British edition of A Clockwork Orange shows Alex, at the age of 18, in his government job at the National Record Library, growing out of his sociopathy and daydreaming about starting a family.
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