A Clockwork Orange

Imagine a bad boy named Alex who loves hurting people and listening to music with his tough friends called droogs in a scary future city. He gets caught by the police and they make him watch mean movies while giving him medicine so he can't be bad anymore, but it makes him super sick and sad because he can't even enjoy his favorite songs. Everyone picks on him now, but later he gets better and thinks maybe being good on his own is best, like choosing to eat veggies instead of being forced.

A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962 by Anthony Burgess, unfolds in a near-future dystopian London where teenage gangs indulge in 'ultra-violence' amid societal decay. The novel's antihero, Alex, a charismatic 15-year-old narrator, leads his droogs—Dim, Georgie, and Pete—in nights of burglary, assault, and Beethoven-fueled rampages, employing the invented 'Nadsat' slang that blends Russian, Cockney, and English to create an alienating, rhythmic prose. Captured after a botched crime, Alex faces imprisonment but volunteers for the experimental Ludovico Technique, a brutal aversion therapy combining drugs, eye-clamps, and violent films synced to classical music, rendering him physically incapable of aggression or even listening to his beloved symphonies. Released into a hostile world, Alex becomes a victim of the violence he once perpetrated, tormented by former victims like the writer F. Alexander and betrayed by his droogs now in authority. The narrative culminates in a controversial 'cure' restoring his free will, prompting reflections on whether enforced goodness is true humanity or mere mechanism—a clockwork orange. Burgess weaves philosophy from behaviorism, free will debates (echoing Skinner and Calvinism), and linguistic play, critiquing both juvenile delinquency and authoritarian overreach in a satire that questions the essence of choice and morality.