Whether or not one believes Alex, the protagonist in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is cured at the end of the book depends upon how we define sick, insane, and cured. By some definitions, Alex is only sane before the treatment and only cured when he jumps from the window. He is a product of his environment and is only dubbed insane because he is different. By some measures, he is no more insane than the rest of his society. By others, he is not sane after the aversion treatment. More than this, it depends upon how we define his disease when and whether he is cured.
Alex is amoral. He does things that please him, and novelty is what he seeks to alleviate the boredom of life in a repressive conformist dystopia. He is not all that different from his contemporaries, good or bad, and he is only punished because he is different. What he craves is excitement and power After all, he is betrayed by his friends, who are different because they do not share his bond with music. Even in his society, he is an anomaly, a violent, uneducated criminal who loves classical music.
He even states this in his assessment: “But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines. I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.”
If we define sanity as being out of step with society, outside the norms, then maybe Alex is saner at the beginning than after the conditioning treatment. Sanity is often defined legally as being aware of the difference between right and wrong and having free will to choose one or the other. If we use this definition, then Alex is sane in the beginning, though criminal and amoral. Furthermore, his contemporaries among the other portions of society are less in control, than Alex, being conditioned to conform. After he is subjected to brutal conditioning, Alex loses his free will to choose. So he is, by legal definition not responsible for his actions, or not competent and insane. So is he “cured” at this point? Hardly, since he was never sick by these definitions. The conditioning can be seen as having imposed an “illness” upon Alex since it has removed his ability to make choices.
Alex says he is “cured” after the conditioning had completely removed any shred of independence he had. He is now incapable of violence of any kind, even in self-defense. F Alexander, previously his victim, considers Alex not to be “cured”, but rather to be dehumanized and he states that this is a terrible thing to have been done to him and that the crime did not warrant such extreme. “You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good&. But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.” So it would seem that Alex is rather imprisoned or destroyed rather than being cured.
In the American version of this book, the story ends with Alex’s recovery after jumping from the window. The resulting concussion has undone the conditioning. While this is less than believable, and perhaps the premise is no more so, it follows that he thinks he is cured. Of course, the reaction the author probably intended to this portion would be one of horrifying relief. Yes, Alex is no longer an automaton, and he can once more enjoy music, but his thoughts immediately turn again to violence. So this could be evidence of an underlying malady, after all, We rethink our initial thought that Alex is freer than the rest of society, since he seems to be compelled to violence.
However, the conditioning, while having made it impossible to act upon these urges, or even to entertain them, did not cure him either, or the condition would not have returned. The treatment merely prevented Alex from acting upon the urges and made him behave in a socially acceptable manner. However, even should we now say that Alex was sick from the beginning, we cannot say he is cured by the conditioning, since locking someone up is not a cure, whether that lock is physical confinement or simply cutting off their legs. It is prevention against the expression of the illness. Furthermore, since these prevention measures do not constitute an illness either, Alex is also not cured when the conditioning is removed.
Perhaps the only time when Alex is truly cured is when he jumps out of the window. Some critics have termed it a “leap of faithe”. While he was driven to this action, it is an action made by his own free will, and it succeeds in breaking the bonds of the conditioning. It is when he recovers from that fall that we believe him when he says he is cured, “When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cutthroat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.” However, we know what he means, and it is not the original antisocial behavior and the compulsion to commit violence that he is cured of, but the imposed malady caused by the government’s conditioning.
In the foreign or British versions of the book, it does not end with the recovery and realization that Alex is once again in control. It ends with his decision to join the establishment, even though he still suffers urges to violence. He contemplates marrying and raising a son, whom he hopes will not be like him, but he also does not believe, that we can extrapolate that some change has taken place. He may learn to live a relatively normal life, ignoring his urges, to have what he now desires. Is this a cure? Perhaps it is the closest thing to one that there is.
The last part of the British version of this book leaves us wondering about Alex’s assumption that his “disease” is genetic. If it is then it will be passed on to his son, and he will struggle to try to help the boy to escape his fate. We, as an audience, do not believe that the condition is genetic, so it leaves us with some small hope for the future, except that we know that it is the society that is producing this type of rebellion. Alex will grow older and be no longer part of the youth culture, and his son’s generation will rule. What falls a bit flat in the 1946 edition is the idea that Alex has undergone a complete transformation and now thinks or cares about the rest of the world. “And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”
This is just too convenient, and it is not a believable ending. For me, it would be a satisfactory ending that Alex wants a normal life. The ambiguity of knowing how difficult and remote that possibility will be is a fit ending. At this point, perhaps Alex is as cured as he will ever be.