Comparing A Clockwork Orange And V For Vendetta

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange presents a dystopian society in which the individual is suppressed in order to facilitate complete state-control; the novel being abundant in both intertextual and contextual influences due to the universal concept of the struggle for freedom in the face of an oppressive regime. There are numerous works which can be associated with the novel; Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta exhibiting traits indicative of influence, George Orwell’s 1984 providing much inspiration for both the dystopian society and methods of torture. Burgess achieves a sense of contextual relevance through the inclusion of various themes and motifs, including communism, youth culture, the Nadsat language, Ludovico’s Technique,
The governing body seeks to control the citizens by any means necessary in order to ensure its survival, ultimately resulting in Alex being subjected to behaviour-altering torture treatment which removes his freedom of choice. On first reading, A Clockwork Orange appears a hyperbolised critical exposé of various aspects of the contemporary society experienced by Burgess; him being openly against the familiarisation of countries throughout the world to more communist, state-driven ways of thinking, believing that it could potentially endanger the welfare of the individual. Nuclear war with Russia being an imminent yet unpredictable threat, the dystopia in which the novel is set could, to some degree, provide Burgess’s estimation of a world post-fallout. These influences manifest themselves in later works, for
Comparable to the English Teddy Boys, who during the 1950s and 1960s became the first youngsters to create their own distinguishable style, Alex and his gang: ‘wore waisty jackets... we had these off-white cravats.’ Notably, the protagonist Alex himself is not described personally; the reader is instead given a comprehensive description of the aesthetics of the youths collectively. In stressing this through the overuse of the collective pronoun ‘we’, the youths are presented as desirous to distinguish themselves from those who conform to state rule, giving themselves a specific image in fighting for their cause; it is not the personal story of Alex we are expected to pursue, rather the struggle for freedom that himself and his ‘brothers’ represent. Thus, further contextual influence can be extracted from the Teddy Boys; their image caused them to be referred to as a collective during their gang activity in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, similarly to Alex and his gang who utilize their appearance when performing free, if violent,