A Clockwork Orange (Style)

Style

Language

Nadsat, which means "teen" in Russian, is the language spoken in A Clockwork Orange. It is a mixture of Russian, English, and American slang, and rhyming words and phrases, with a touch of Shakespearean English. The singsong rhythm of the speech underscores the heavily stylized world of the novel and of Alex's own mind. Although many readers often initially struggle with understanding this slang of futuristic teenagers, they quickly pick up the speech patterns and the few hundred new words through the context in which they are used. By mirroring the violent acts the characters commit, Nadsat has a kind of onomatopoeic quality. That is, the words sound like the actions they describe. For example, "collocoll" means bell, and it also sounds like a bell ringing. Nadsat is also often highly metaphoric and ironic. The word "rabbit," for example, means to work, and the word "horrorshow" means beautiful. The former is metaphoric because working, for Alex, means engaging in meaningless and frenetic activity, which he associates with a rabbit's behavior. The latter is ironic because "horrorshow" suggests the opposite of what it means. Some of the words are just plain silly rhymes, reflecting a child's playful constructions. For example, "eggiwegg" for egg and "skolliwoll" for school.

Structure

The novel is divided into three sections of seven chapters each. In his introduction to the 1987 American edition of the novel, Burgess notes that "Novelists of my stamp are interested in what is called arithmology, meaning that [a] number has to mean something in human terms when they handle it." At twenty-one, citizens in Great Britain, the United States, and Russia can vote; the age sym-bolizes a mature human being. The novel is the story of one human being's growth into an adult, among other things.