If you have read the book or watched the film, I would then recommend reading Burgess's orginal script that included the 21st chapter( left out in the US/Kubrick version). It talks about Alex as an adult.
quote:
Let us go further. The rest of the world was sold the book out of Great Britain, and so most versions... have the original twenty-one chapters. Now when Stanley Kubrick made his film - though he made it in Englad - he followed the American version and, so it seemed to his audiences outside America, ended the story somewhat prematurely. People wrote to me about this - indeed much of my later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention - while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanor. Life is, of course, terrible.
Burgess goes on to discuss the merits of the 21st chapter and the meaning of the title (and the loss thereof in translation); he ends with:
Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgegment may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. 'Quod scripsi scripsi' said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. 'What I have written I have Written.' We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess, November 1986
the 21st chapter obviously re-directs the whole perspective of the novel/film that we know. Kubricks film directed us to believe that humans cannot change, even through behavioral manipulation. Burgess's last chapter contradicts that idea. Humans DO have the ability to change, but they must have the will to do it themselves, without outside forces.
like he said though, "eat this sweetish segment or spit it out"
[This message has been edited by Dave Robicheaux (edited 4/5/2010 11:30p).]
