Nadsat

straightforward, colloquial English, A Clockwork Orange’s most striking stylistic touch is Burgess’s use of invented, or ‘borrowed’, words with which he bestows the novella’s fifteen-year old protagonist and narrator, Alex. This meta-language, called nadsat, is a blend of Standard English, Russian, British slang and original coinage and initially distances us from Alex until the reader is able to infer the meanings of several key terms. At the point at which we begin to comfortably translate,…

A dystopian society is one in which the government enforces a certain lifestyle upon its people without giving them a choice to live their lives otherwise. Their main goal is to control everyone and make them conform to these expectations. This type of futuristic society was created by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange. In the book, the reader can identify one main theme; the importance of free will. The reader is taken through the book by 15-year-old Alex whom along with his…

Through the use of nadsat (the language they speak) they sound very kiddish at times. The whole book is focused on the question of free will. Alex and his peers use complete free will in all of their decisions, which is why there is a schism between the normal people and…