Chapter 21, of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Essay

Chapter 21, of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - Essay Example He does not like to share his money with them and even says, â€Å"I don’t know, I don’t know. What it is is I don’t like just throwing away my hard-earned pretty polly, that’s what it is.† (Thrawn). His taste for the heavy classical music has changed for softer tunes. He comes to the realization that youth had just been a passing phase, something deceptively engaging like an animated toy, †¦like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grr grr grr and off ititties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. (Thrawn) And as he tries to communicate his just-out-of-teenage wisdom to his imaginary son in a conversation that he shapes in his mind, he even realizes that his son will not understand it and behave exactly the way he did, given the circumstances, in his growing up years. His son’s son will not understand it either, if explained by the son, and that is the essential nature of youth that Alex comprehends in retrospection. The fact that Stanley Kubric decided not to make use of Chapter 21 in his movie version of the novel has raked a lot of debates regarding the omission of this chapter in the American publication. However, it can be argued that a movie, being a different medium of art that is dependent on its creator’s vision, may not have succeeded in expressing and conveying this powerful chapter the way the novel did. But for an introspective reader, the narrative style that has some shock value with the sheer use of nadsat, and the unconventional mode of storytelling thanks to the specific mental state of the narrator-protagonist and the bizarre futuristic events