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.

Warning: Plot Details Follow!

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 is selected for the "Ludovico Treatment" (a form of aversion therapy designed to make its recipient nauseous at the sight or thought of violence) after he and his cellmates stomp an obnoxious fellow prisoner to death and he gets all the blame.

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. After a suicide attempt, 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.