Alex DeLarge

Alex (Alexander) DeLarge (his last name is never given in the novel) is the narrator and antihero of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange and the movie of the same name, in which he is played by Malcolm McDowell.

Alex is portrayed as a sociopath, who robs, rapes and ultimately murders without a twinge of conscience, even though he knows intellectually that this sort of behavior is wrong. He says that "you can't have a society with everybody behaving in my manner of the night." He professes to be puzzled by the motivations of those who wish to reform him and others like him, saying that he would never interfere with their desire to be good; it's just that he "goes to the other shop."

He speaks Nadsat most of the time, an invented slang based on English but with many Russian words, as well as borrowings from bits of Romany speech, and schoolboy colloquialisms. He is very fond of classical music, particularly Beethoven, or, as he calls him, "lovely lovely Ludwig van." While listening to this music, he fantasizes about endless rampages of torture and slaughter, to the point of orgasm.

At the beginning of the novel, Alex is fifteen years old and already a veteran of several stays in institutions for juvenile delinquents. (He was portrayed as older in the movie, along with some of his female victims, to minimize controversy) He lives with his parents in a "flatblock" (apartment house) in an unnamed city in an unnamed, but Socialist, country. He is the leader of a gang of "droogs" (friends)---Pete, George and Dim. Although the youngest, he is the most intelligent of the foursome, and comes up with most of the ideas. His downfall comes when George, who resents his high-handed ways, sets him up to be arrested at the site of one of the gang's crimes, and he is sent to prison for murder.

In prison, Alex does not follow the convict code of ethics---he betrays a fellow prisoner's escape plans to the prison chaplain, knowing that he will report it to the warden. He curries the chaplain's favor by reading the Bible (using it to fantasize about being one of the crueler Roman emperors, or one of the soldiers who tortured Christ.) He is selected for the "Ludovico Treatment" after he and his cellmates stomp an obnoxious fellow prisoner to death and he gets all the blame. The treatment, a form of aversion therapy, involves injecting him with a drug that upsets his stomach and then showing him films of rape and violence, so that he will associate such acts with pain and become sick at the thought of hurting anyone. While being forced to watch footage from a Nazi concentration camp, Alex notices the soundtrack--his favorite song, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. From here on out, he associates Beethoven with violence and can't hear it without getting sick.

After the Ludovico Treatment, Alex' sentence is commuted to time served, and he is released. However, the treatment worked too well---he now can not defend himself even when necessary. He is rejected by his parents and nearly beaten to death by a homeless man he had victimized before going to prison. When the police break it up, they turn out to be none other than George and Dim, who brutalize him further and leave him to die. Everytime Alex tries to defend himself, he's brought to his knees with pain and nausea.

Disoriented with pain, Alex stumbles to the nearest house, pleading for help. The owner, a wheelchair-bound writer the government calls "subversive", recognizes Alex from the newspapers and wants to help him. Alex recognizes the writer as well--as a man he and his friends had once beaten nearly to death (hence his paralysis) and forced to watch as they raped and murdered his wife. The writer doesn't make the connection at first, but knows who he's dealing with once he hears Alex singing the theme song from the Gene Kelly musical Singin' in the Rain, the same song the droogs had sung as they attacked him. Wanting revenge, the writer drugs Alex, locks him in a room and forces him to listen to the Fifth Symphony, which Alex had told him made him sick.

Wracked with pain, Alex tries to commit suicide by jumping out the window--only to awake in a hospital with his parents welcoming him back home and the Prime Minister, smarting from the bad publicity Alex's case had brought, offering him a government job. The effects of the Treatment are gone, and he is his old self again: "I was cured all right."

The final chapter of the British edition of A Clockwork Orange hints that Alex, at about the age of twenty-one, is growing out of his sociopathy.