Alex Delarge: Anti-Hero

Alex DeLarge; The Authentic Anti-Hero

Jillian Campbell

The novel, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, is about a young man, Alex DeLarge, living in a dystopian future. He enjoys violence, sex, Beethoven, blood and his "droogs" Pete, Dim and Georgie. Throughout the novel, Alex and his friends use a dialect known as Nadsat, which is a mix of Russian and British countryside slang spoken by adolescents at the time. Beethoven is his favourite composer due to his violent undertones and strong symphonies, the Ninth is his favorite. The two literary theories, Existentialism and Freud, are very prominent throughout the novel shown by Burgess' Anti-Hero Alex, and his progression from an authentic lifestyle, to one that is inauthentic, then back again and throughout this, according to Freud theory; his inability to control his ID (his impulses), and his oral-aggressive personality corresponds with Alex having reached the genital stage of development.

Alex is the protagonist in the novel as well as Your Humble Narrator, and is portrayed as a sociopath who enjoys rape, murder and violence. He is portrayed as an Anti-Hero because he is deeply flawed; he enjoys people's pain, as he is a rapist and murderer at age fifteen, and views himself as an ubermench. Although Alex's actions cause unsurpassable damage to those he preys on, his actions show he creates his own existence. "The Luna was well up now, and we could viddy this cottage fine and clear as I eased up and put the break on, the other three giggling like bezoomny, and we could viddy the name on the gate of this cottage veshch was HOME, a gloomy sort of name."1 This is seen as authentic from an existentialist point of view simply because Alex does what he wants, whenever he wants it. During the second chapter, Alex, Pete, Dim and Georgie come upon a house, which turns out later to be F. Alexander's house, and eventually end up raping his wife, simultaneously paralysing the writer. Alex and his mates are demonstrating, (in a horrid way), a perfectly authentic lifestyle; "Then after me it was right old Dim should have his turn, which he did in a beasty snorty howly sort of a way with his Peebee Shelley maskie taking no notice, while I held on to her. Then there was a changeover, Dim and me grabbing the slobbering writer veck who was past struggling really, only just coming out with slack sort of slovos like he was in the land of the Milk Plus bar, and Pete and Georgie had theirs."2 This quote illustrates the type of language Alex and his friends speak and the brutality Alex brings.

After one particularly bad night out with his droogs, Pete, Dim and Georgie strand him during a "job", Alex is caught by the police, and eventually sentenced to fourteen years in federal prison while Pete, Dim and Georgie are free. During this period, Alex has an Awakening Moment where he realizes he lives recklessly and vows to change. Whilst in prison, Alex attempts to take up bible study to impress his supervisors which is deemed inauthentic in existentialist theory because he is doing it to please others, and not himself, but shortly later he murders his cellmate and this outlines a brief flip-flop of authenticity. Alex is eventually offered to partake in a new experimental study known as Behavioural-brainwashing, that will not allow him to even think about committing a crime or he will experience extreme sickness. Alex agrees, and the two week session begins, one of the sessions, is accompanied by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Alex survives the treatment, and is re-released into society deemed a changed man, incapable of brutality, but he can no longer listen to Beethoven after his previous session. After surviving two attacks on his life by past conflict, Alex comes upon the cottage of F. Alexander; "This kind of veck put his rookers round my pletchoes