Speaking in Nadsat May Make People Look at You Weird

So after numerous posts criticizing both aspects of The Road directly, and the audiobook guy who narrates it in an extremely personal manner, I have moved on to a new book called A Clockwork Orange. After seeing a few scenes from the film at various points in my life, and also hearing other students discuss their experiences reading it, I decided to give it a try. I can assure you that the unusually low page number was not a factor in my decision.

Now there’s something quite special about this novel, which is that a great deal of the words in the novel are from a made-up language called Nadsat. This is because Alex is used to speaking of in this teenage slang, and since the perspective is first-person, we get to read this a s a result. Anthony Burgess invented this language as a sort of British slang to provide context to the futuristic society that novel depicts.

So the novel is narrated from a first-person perspective by our main character, Alex. Alex is only fifteen-years old but the sorts of things he spends his nights doing would suggest he is quite a bit older. Before I write any further I would like to say that the characters in this book are like especially terrible human-beings and some of the scenes are quite disturbing. This is main issue I have with A Clockwork Orange because I moved from a novel depicting the apocalypse in quite literally drenched in negative word choice to a book in which our fifteen-year-old narrator is  diagnosable sociopath that spends his nights breaking into people’s homes and ruining their lives.

          He also occasionally makes references to the fact that he is narrating/writing this story which could suggest that he is choosing the write the story after the events have taken place at some point in the future. Here’s an example of this:

“And then I was into another saucer brimful of creamy moloko and near went flying again, the whole veshch really a very humorous one if you could imagine it sloochatting to some other veck and not to Your Humble Narrator,” (38).

We can also thank the Nadsat language for making my spellcheck go insane, because it most definitely does not consider “sloochatting” a word. Apparently “moloko” is though, because it is the name of a musical duo from what appears to be the 1980’s. Anyway, two things on this sort of narration. First of all, the Nadsat language redeems this novel quite to a great deal. It’s not super extensive, possibly around 120 words or so, and it does warrant that I have to look up words occasionally in the Nadsat glossary, but it does provide some interesting immersion effects that I have yet to experience with any other novels. Also, since one of my friends is also reading A Clockwork Orange, we have devised a plan to speak in secret using this teenage-slang language. However I think we’ll just end up looking like idiots and only partial parts of conversation will end up being secretive.

Going back to the passage what is also noticeable about the style of the novel is how British it is. Well British and Russian, as apparently the Nadsat language was composed out of short Russian words and then British endings, but none the less the form of the sentences is noticeably British. This passage demonstrates it a little bit better:

“All round my gulliver was a bandage and there were bits of stuff like stuck to my litso, and my rookers were all in bandages and like bits of stick were like fixed to my fingers like on it might be flowers to make them grow straight, and my poor old nogas were all straightened out too, and it was all bandages and wire cages and into my right rooker, near the pletcho, was red red krovvy dripping from a jar upside down,” (149)

Notice the sort of run-on sentence form that is used in the passage. Not that that is particularly British, but it demonstrates the style a lot more clearly. The use of “like” and the use of “too.” They aren’t used to convey and idea but instead explain something specifically, which additionally makes it sound very British. This is not to say it contributes to anything very meaningful, but it certainly is a stylistic point used by Burgesses in the novel to provide substance to Alex’s character and increase the immersion that the novel offers to the reader.