A Clockwork Orange Mystery

Recently, for the first time, I read the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Several years ago I saw the movie and was deeply disturbed by the morbid tale but I figured I’d give the book a chance. Well, it paid off.

First, let me give you a synopsis if you are new to the story. It begins in the not-too-distant future in England where violence is rampant. The main character, Alex, is in his late teens, still in high school, a leader of a violent street gang, and on parole. His fellow gang members get him arrested and after writhing in jail for a couple years Alex agrees to an experiment that will alter his mental state but get him out of prison.

When he is released if he even thinks about violence, sex, or listens to Classical music he begins to wretch violently. He becomes a drifter and unknowingly takes refuge in the house of one of his victims from before his imprisonment. The host eventually remembers who Alex is, locks him in an attic and begins to play Classical music as loudly as possible. Alex wretches to the point he can take it no longer and chooses suicide by jumping out the window.

As Alex recovers in the hospital a civil liberties organization gets him his freedom but the big news is that the fall reset his brain, and with the chilling words Alex says, “I was cured all right.”

And that is where the movie and the 1962 US edition ended. But the original version of A Clockwork Orange ended differently. Perhaps for some of you this is old news but I just recently learned of this literary flaw. Apparently the entire last chapter, Chapter 21, was left off of the US 1962 edition. Why? According to the 1986 introduction American publishers thought Chapter 21 was a “sellout.”

The final chapter was too British, an “unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil.” Americans were “tougher than the British and could face up to reality.”

So what happened in Chapter 21 that was too unbelievable to include in the American edition? Well, after being freed from prison Alex goes back to a life of crime but then something happens. Now in his early 20s he realizes violence and a life of crime was adolescent and immature. He decides – on his own – that it is time to grow up and put away his youthful indiscretions. The original text ends with Alex moving on with his life as a redeemed man.

Burgess noted that his book “was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted [by American publishers] was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better.”

WHAT THE CHORT IS WRONG WITH US?! You mean to tell me we [us U.S. Americans] would rather have a story of never ending cruelty than a “Christmas Carole-esque” tale of personal redemption and change?

So that brings me to my question, are we really like this or was the publisher wrong? Would Americans have actually preferred the original version? Can a man change, or more importantly can a man be forced to change or do we have to do it on our own like Alex? This has been on my mind for the past couple weeks and I’m trying to be optimistic but I don’t know. Do you?