How Does Burgess Use Dramatic Irony In A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange frequently employs irony for a variety of purposes. While much of the irony Burgess uses is situational, and is mostly meant to deconstruct the reader’s pre established sense of morality, he also uses dramatic irony to frustratingly detach the reader from the novel. In the second chapter of the book, Alex and his “droogies” break into the cottage of an author named F. Alexander, severely beating the man and raping his wife. During the break-in, Alex stumbles across a manuscript titled A CLOCKWORK ORANGE which states:“The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness...laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen”(25). It should be painfully obvious to the reader that this

It is only when it is too late, when Alex has just finished the treatment, that he realizes that he is “to be like a clockwork orange”(141). It would be unfair to blame Alex for failing to acknowledge such an obvious warning, as he has no idea that he is in a story, let alone a story titled A Clockwork Orange. In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster addresses this type of dramatic irony as “ironic mode”, in which the reader observes “characters who possess a lower degree of autonomy, self-determination, or free will than ourselves”(253). Foster points to a similar situation in the play Waiting for Godot, in which two tramps are presented with a solution to escape the desolate country, a road, in this case, which they fail to take notice “without our ingrained expectations about roads”(253). Just like how the two tramps ignore a solution that is right in front of them, Alex tears up a vital warning that could have saved him the torment that comes with choosing the Ludovico