A Clockwork Orange

Chapter-by-chapter summary

Spoiler warning: this section covers the whole plot, including the ending.

Part One, Chapter 1: Milk-plus and a masked raid

Alex, fifteen, sits with his droogs Pete, Georgie and Dim at the Korova Milkbar, drinking milk-plus, milk laced with a drug. The gang beats an elderly man walking home from the library and takes his money. They spend it on drinks for a few drunk old women who will vouch for their alibi. Later, wearing lifelike masks of historical figures, they raid a cigarette and sweets shop and badly hurt the shopkeeper’s wife. The alibi holds. The chapter sets up the book’s central trick: Alex narrates his crimes in a bright, almost cheerful voice, and the reader has to sit with the gap.

Part One, Chapter 2: The cottage marked HOME

The gang fights a rival group led by Billyboy until police sirens send everyone scattering. They steal a car and drive it recklessly through the countryside, running down animals. At a cottage with a gate marked HOME, Alex politely claims that a friend has collapsed outside. The writer’s wife goes to fetch water and leaves the door unlocked, and the gang goes in wearing masks. They beat the writer and sexually assault his wife. Before leaving, Alex mocks the writer’s manuscript, titled A Clockwork Orange, and tears it up. The title first appears as something Alex destroys, and the writer will come back into Alex’s life later.

Part One, Chapter 3: Friends who stop being friends

The gang runs out of fuel, abandons the car and takes a train back toward the city, tearing up the seat upholstery on the way. At the Korova the mood turns sour. Dim makes a crude remark, and Alex punches him in the mouth. Dim says he no longer wants to be Alex’s friend. Alex insists that someone must be in charge, even among friends. Pete says the punch was uncalled for. Dim suggests dropping the argument, and the boys agree to meet the next night. This quarrel over who leads is the first sign that the gang is coming apart.

Part One, Chapter 4: Deltoid and the two girls

Alex wakes with a headache and stays home from school. His Post-Corrective Adviser, P. R. Deltoid, visits and warns him to keep out of trouble, which Alex brushes off. He reads a newspaper full of violence and approves of a clergyman who blames the devil for youth crime. Then he goes out to buy Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. At a record shop he meets two ten-year-old girls, takes them to his parents’ flat, gives them a lot of Scotch and sexually assaults both of them. The chapter shows Alex’s love of Beethoven sitting beside real cruelty, a contradiction the book keeps testing.

Part One, Chapter 5: The fight for leadership

Alex tells his parents his night was odd jobs, then meets his droogs at the foot of the flatblock stairs. Georgie mocks his leadership, and Pete explains that the gang wants a fairer “new way”, with a voice for everyone. A piece of Beethoven from a passing car sends Alex into a violent surge, and he cuts Georgie’s hand with his razor. Dim swings his chain, Alex slashes Dim’s wrist, then binds it with cloth from his pocket to reassert his lead. Georgie proposes robbing the Manse, the home of an old woman who keeps cats. The fight over leadership pushes the gang toward the crime that will send Alex to prison.

Part One, Chapter 6: The house of cats

The gang reaches the Manse, a large house with barred windows and saucers of milk for its cats. A false story about a friend who has fainted gets them to the door, but the old woman threatens to shoot them if they do not leave. Eager to prove himself, Alex secretly decides to rob the house alone and climbs in through a window. The old woman confronts him with her walking-stick, and the cats attack. Alex hits her with a heavy object until she falls silent. When sirens sound, Dim whips Alex with his chain and runs, and the police find Alex alone in the hallway. The chapter links Alex’s pride and his friends’ betrayal to a death.

Part One, Chapter 7: The confession

At the police station Alex asks for a lawyer. The officers laugh and beat him. P. R. Deltoid arrives, looks at him as an object rather than a boy, and spits in his face. Under pressure Alex writes and signs a statement describing the crimes and naming his friends. In a holding cell two prisoners try to molest him until a policeman steps in. He then learns that the old woman has died in hospital, and he admits to himself that he has committed murder at fifteen. The state treats him as a problem to manage rather than a person to understand.

Part Two, Chapter 1: Staja

Two years after his arrest, Alex narrates from Staja, the State Jail, where he is serving a fourteen-year sentence. He describes beatings and the unwelcome advances of other prisoners. His parents have told him that Georgie was killed in a robbery that went wrong. By showing keen interest in the Bible, Alex wins the prison chaplain’s favour and helps at the Sunday services. Hearing of a way to end a sentence quickly and stop a prisoner from offending again, he asks the chaplain about it. The chaplain names it the Ludovico Technique, says it is untested, and is doubtful about it. Goodness, he tells Alex, is something chosen, and a man who cannot choose has stopped being fully a man. This conversation lays out the question of the whole second part.

Part Two, Chapter 2: The new cellmate

A new prisoner arrives and claims Alex’s bed, saying the youngest should sleep on the floor. The other cellmates back Alex. That night Alex wakes to find the newcomer in his bed and punches him. The others join in, and the guards arrive to find the man badly hurt. In the dark the prisoners attack him again, and by morning he is dead. The cellmates blame Alex, and the Governor locks the prison down. Officials talk about a curative approach to crime, and one suggests sending Alex to Brodsky. The death gives the state an opening to try its new method.

Part Two, Chapter 3: Consent and the medical compound

The Governor tells Alex that his visitor of the day before was the new Minister of the Interior. Alex will be given the Reclamation Treatment under Dr Brodsky and released from state custody in two weeks. The Governor warns that it is not a reward, and Alex signs a consent form. The chaplain then speaks to Alex alone. He says he objects to the treatment and wonders whether God would value a man who is forced to be good, and he is plainly upset. The next morning Alex is taken to a new medical compound near the prison. Dr Branom, Brodsky’s assistant, explains that the treatment uses films and a course of injections, but he is vague about what is in the injections. Alex eats a large meal and plans a new gang for when he is free. Then a nurse gives him a shot, and he feels strangely weak. The chapter lets the reader see that Alex agrees only because he wants out.

Part Two, Chapter 4: The first films

Alex is strapped into a chair with his eyelids held open and made to watch violent films. Dr Brodsky watches the results closely and is pleased. As Alex grows sick and begins to feel pain, he is told it is his imagination. The doctors treat his suffering as proof that the method works. The treatment is cruel from its first session, and the reader sees the experiment through a body in distress.

Part Two, Chapter 5: More films, twice a day

The sessions go on, with films in the morning and again in the afternoon. Still sick and worn out, Alex blames the wires attached to his body, and the screen, for his misery. He says he does not want to describe the worst of what he is made to watch. The treatment aims at his body’s reflexes rather than at his reasons for acting.

Part Two, Chapter 6: Ludwig van and the injections

The doctors show Alex a film of Nazi war crimes set to a movement of Beethoven. Alex is sickened and outraged. He cries that it is a sin to use Ludwig van like that, since Beethoven never harmed anyone, and he vomits. The doctors are surprised, and they suspect the treatment has tied Beethoven’s music to nausea. Brodsky then tells Alex that the injections are conditioning him to link violence with sickness. Alex protests, then pretends to repent, but Brodsky is not convinced. When Alex hits a nurse to avoid an injection, orderlies restrain him. Later, on a morning when he is not injected, he finds the effects have settled into his blood. That night he fakes cries of pain, and an orderly comes in. Alex plans to attack him but is sick at the thought of hurting him, and the orderly punches him. The chapter explains how the treatment works in Alex’s own words.

Part Two, Chapter 7: The passing-out day

On the final day Alex gets his old clothes and belongings back, and he is presented to the Governor, the chaplain, the Minister, the doctors and the staff. A large actor insults him and dares him to strike back. Alex tries but is overwhelmed by sickness. He grovels instead and offers to clean the man’s boots. A young actress is brought out, and Alex offers to worship and protect her. The chaplain objects that Alex has no real choice and that fear of pain, not goodness, is driving him. Dr Brodsky is satisfied: the lesson is that Alex has become a model Christian who will turn the other cheek. The scene makes the state’s success look like a cruelty of its own.

Part Three, Chapter 1: Back at Flatblock 18A

The morning after his release, Alex stands outside the white building, worn out by interviews and photographs. The papers carry his picture and the Minister praises the new system. At his parents’ flat, a lodger named Joe has taken his room, and his stereo and records are gone. Alex realises that the world he left no longer has a place for him. The chapter shows a boy turned into a public example, with even his home no longer his own.

Part Three, Chapter 2: The record shop and the library

Alex visits his old record shop, now run by a teenager who mocks him. In the listening booth the music he once loved makes him sick, and he sees that the treatment has spoiled it for him. He goes to the public library hoping to find a painless way to kill himself. He picks up a Bible for comfort, but it upsets him. An old man recognises him as the one who once beat him, and other elderly men join in and attack him until the police arrive. The scene shows his former victims getting a chance to strike back.

Part Three, Chapter 3: The police car

Police officers pull Alex away from the old men. Two of them are Billyboy, his former enemy, and Dim, his former droog. They push Alex into the back of the police car and tease him. Dim pretends to have forgotten who Pete is. Out in the quiet countryside, the two beat him again, leave him outside the town and drive off. When rain starts, Alex gets up and begins to walk. The irony of the chapter is that the men meant to keep order are the men who once hurt him.

Part Three, Chapter 4: A bath and a supper

Walking through the rain, Alex comes to a cottage with a gate marked HOME, and he knocks. He tells the middle-aged writer, F. Alexander, that the police beat him and left him to die. Alexander brings him to a warm fire and gives him whisky, a bath, pyjamas and a full supper. During supper he says he knows who Alex is, having seen his picture in the papers. He calls the Ludovico Technique cruel, says it has taken away Alex’s power to choose, and asks for his help in bringing down the government. Then he begins to tell what happened to his wife. The chapter sets up the plan that turns Alex into a political symbol.

Part Three, Chapter 5: Plans made without him

The next morning F. Alexander has been on the phone for hours and has written an article, to be printed under Alex’s name, attacking the Reclamation Treatment. Alex lets slip a remark that shows he remembers the night of the attack, and Alexander grows suspicious. Three political allies arrive and discuss how to use Alex without saying what he will gain. When Alexander fixes on the name of Dim, an old droog, he says he could almost believe Alex was one of the men who attacked his wife. Alex says he has paid for his crimes and those of his droogs. The three men drive him to an apartment that will be his new home. There he is woken by a symphony he has not heard for years. His first delight turns to sickness, he pounds on the walls until his hands bleed, and then he opens the window and jumps into the street. The question of the book shifts from what Alex did to what others want to make of him.

Part Three, Chapter 6: Declared cured

Alex wakes in hospital, heavily bandaged. The government, anxious about the bad publicity, now courts him. Doctors test him with pictures and words, and the results show his old reactions have come back: the treatment has been undone. The Minister visits with reporters, shakes his hand, offers him a good job and has a stereo brought in for him. As the music plays, it fills him with joy again, and he concludes that he was cured all right. The state’s cure becomes a public event.

Part Three, Chapter 7: Growing up

Now eighteen, Alex works for a national music archive and spends his evenings at the Korova with new droogs, Len, Rick and Bully. He is the oldest and gives the orders, but he senses that Bully wants more control. He carries a magazine picture of a baby, which his friends tear up. When they plan a robbery, he tells them to go ahead without him and leaves. Walking alone, he thinks he has gone soft. In a coffee shop he meets Pete, now nineteen and married, who speaks like a grown man. Alex wonders whether he, too, is outgrowing this life and imagines a home with a wife and a baby son. He knows his son may turn out like him, but he decides to look for a wife. The final chapter gives his change a source in growing up rather than in the state’s cure.

Characters

• Alex: The narrator, a fifteen-year-old who leads the gang and speaks Nadsat. He is clever, cruel and funny, and his cheerful voice is what makes the book unsettling. By Part Three he is eighteen and trying to live without the gang.
• Pete: The calmer voice in the gang, who questions the punch on Dim and later explains the wish for a fairer “new way”. He marries and settles into an ordinary life, which gives Alex a picture of an ending he could still reach.
• Georgie: He challenges Alex’s leadership with sarcasm and proposes the raid on the Manse. He is killed in a botched robbery while Alex is in prison, and Alex learns of it in Part Two.
• Dim: The muscle of the gang, who fights with a bicycle chain. He turns on Alex, later joins the police, and in Part Three helps beat Alex in the countryside.
• P. R. Deltoid: Alex’s Post-Corrective Adviser, an official who checks on him. He treats Alex as an object rather than a boy, and spits in his face after the arrest.
• F. Alexander: The writer whose cottage Alex wrecked. His wife dies after the attack, and he is left deeply hurt. Later he wants to use Alex as a symbol against the government.
• The prison chaplain: He tells Alex that goodness has to be chosen and asks whether a man who cannot choose can still be good. His doubts about the treatment give Part Two its moral voice.
• Dr Brodsky and Dr Branom: Brodsky runs the Ludovico Technique and watches Alex’s reactions closely. Branom is his assistant, who explains the treatment to Alex.
• The Minister of the Interior: The official who backs the treatment in the name of cutting crime, and who later shows Alex to reporters as a success.

Writing about this book

If you are writing a book report, avoid a plot list and start from one question. You could ask whether Alex changes because he chooses to or because he is forced, then test your answer against one chapter from Part One and one from Part Three. Language is another route. Nadsat makes violence sound playful, so ask why Burgess gave a cruel narrator a cheerful voice and how that changes your reaction as a reader. You could also compare the chaplain’s view of free will in Part Two with Alex’s thinking in the final chapter. When you quote, use short lines from the English original and name the part and chapter. Your own reasoning, not the story, is what makes the essay worth reading.