Man is born with the ability to make choices. These choices are guided by conscience; an inner moral guide to what is right or wrong. The choice man makes have consequences and they only serve to give room for conscience to continue being a guiding force or be repressed or “dies” such that wrong is tolerated and becomes the norm. However, this conscience does not die. It is merely snuffed like a flame that can be rekindled once in a while to start a fire. Good still resides in them and can be brought to light in when a situation calls for it. In such moments, what is it going to be then? Will good triumph over bad? Alex with his huge record of accusations had moments when his conscience would be rekindled and he knew he acted opposite of what was expected.
Alex smacked Dim when he uttered a number of vulgarities to the girl at the milk bar who sang along to an opera by Friedrich Gitterfenster called ‘Das Bettzeug.’ Alex knew how much courage it took for a youngster to listen to, love and sing along to such high-quality music in an era when pop was the music for the young souls. He would go to the extents of defending an outsider and start a fight with his gang mates without even his mates knowing what the fight was all about. He reveres his choice of music for being a peaceful world and his choice of being a lover of crooked ways would not allow him to watch his friends mock it.
Alex was disgusted and appalled by the heinous acts of the police who were supposed to be the law enforcers yet were acting as rogue as Alex when he attacked his victims. Contrary to Alex who had chosen a life of crime, the police had chosen a life of protection. Raping innocent women, beating helpless people to near death and destroying what their victims worked hard and tirelessly for did not have any impact in his life and neither did it cause him to have a sleepless night thinking of his ills. He was a selfish man who did not think of the consequences his actions had on his victims' lives. He, however, saw the same look of venom in the police who beat him up to the point of getting sick and not caring that he was almost assaulted in the cell by a fellow detainee. He got a moment of self-recollection to the point where he was apologetic for being rude to the police and for getting sick all over the floor “Sorry, brothers, that was not the right thing at all. Sorry sorry sorry.” (Anthony 27)
Whether it was due to the effect of the injections they were giving him, Alex felt that the films that he was made to watch at the reclamation center had a lot of injustice in them. Alex describes the his ordeal as “This was real, very real, though if you thought about it properly you couldn't imagine ladies actually agreeing to have all this done to them in a film, and if these films were made by the Good or the State you couldn't imagine them being allowed to take these films without like interfering with what was going on” (Anthony 39). Alex was a perpetrator of these crimes but he felt that the rights of the people in the films had been violated and felt even angrier at the ones who made these films for standing there and shooting them without rescuing the victims. He felt that even though the government was trying to achieve something they had used the wrong approach. He further went ahead to reproach the doctors for associating music by Mozart and Bach with tragic events yet this is the music that made him human after his inhumane acts. They had managed to taint music he revered such that even when he went out of the reclamation center it reminded him of the injustice in the films. He could no longer use it as his escape to a world where everything was heavenly and peaceful.
The prison was a place of condemnation. Alex started off by hating and mocking his fellow inmates as filthy and for letting the Word of God change them. He felt it was a punishment being made to sit and listen to the Charlie and if not worse being locked up to read it. However, good eventually triumphed and evil and he read it to the last bit synthesizing what it had for him. Alex had an inner conversion which he writes as ”While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the height of Roman fashion” (Anthony 30). He further became a critique of the big book seeing the one who built his house on sand as stupid and having bad neighbors who did not correct him yet they saw his mistake.
The justice system had once again failed to act within their mandate to protect the people and had become perpetrators of injustice. At a time when Alex thought that a call to the police would be a rescue to him after the thorough beating he received at the library, they turned out to be the continuity of the torture he had already received. His old friend Dim and archrival Billyboy were his saviors. There was so much injustice and it all acted to his undoing. However, he did not let the old days get him into a vengeance fight with Dim for being the reason he was arrested, charged and sentenced to prison.
Conscience if allowed to be the guiding will guide man to coexist peacefully with fellow being as it will make man aware of the injustices in the world and lead man to choices that will avoid being the cause of the injustice. The conscience of men once allowed to die I exposure too these heinous acts can only be rekindled through love and situations that make a man vulnerable.
Reference
Burgess, Anthony . A Clockwork Orange. n.d. ePUB.
