Pertinent Recurring Symbols
Throughout the novel, Burgess utilizes a few symbols that have become a staple to the A Clockwork Orange universe. Below I've outlined a few.
Beethoven's The Ninth Symphony
Alex's all-time favorite piece of music is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, specifically the finale. After a night of "ultraviolence" he finds ecstasy in listening to the concert, "then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss, and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rockers on the pillow glaszzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds" (37). However, in one of the horrible Ludovico rehabilitation trials, the song happens to be the backdrop to a violent scene, leading to an associative repulsion to the song in addition to the act of brutality. His song of bliss and jubilation has become a repugnant source of pain, "stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It's a sin. Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone" (129). Also, as explained earlier, the inability to hear this song is the catalyst for his eventual suicide attempt and furthers the message that the government is suppressing our free will. This downward spiral that the song has on him is ironic because historically, Beethoven's Ninth symphony represents a positive trend toward greatness. The finale "evokes life in community, in happiness and peace, a utopian vision. Beethoven merged the instrumental and the vocal for the first time in symphonic music, to express these revolutionary ideals, won through struggle, with the help of human singing" (Farrell). Burgess took a true representation of greatness and power and mangled it to track an opposite narrative.
Milk
Throughout the novel, Alex and his droogs are continually illustrated as consuming milk, a generic emblem of nourishment or motherhood. However, similar to the Ninth Symphony, Anthony Burgess completely flips this symbolism on its head. This is no normal milk, this was milk from the "Korova Milkbar... which had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put in the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes... or you could peet milk with knives in it, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one" (3-4). Although utilizing the uncanny and unrecognizable Nadsat discussed earlier, it's clear that this milk is a sort of alcohol or hallucinogen to be drunk by those engaging in wrongdoings. This mutilation of a nurturing symbol highlights the lack of humanity that Burgess believes has possessed society.
The Human Body
In this dystopian world, there is a clear fascination with sex and sexualizing the human body, specifically breasts, or "groodies" as Alex calls them (5). This symbol is much more pronounced in the film adaption, but to lay the groundwork for that later discussion, I'll discuss its significance in the novel. The female breast is continually referenced, from the opening chapter where the "devotchkas at the counter... had long black straight dresses, and on the groody part of them had little badges of like silver with different malchicks' names on the," to a biblical dream where he, as God, makes love to women with "real horrorshow groodies," and to the last chapter where the first thing he notices about his nurse is her "pair of false groodies" (4, 81, 194). This constant fascination with them demonstrates the youth's innate obsession with sex (and as previously discussed, rape). The fact that it returns in the end also furthers Burgess's theme that everyone is inherently bad and has their ways.
