Comparing A Clockwork Orange And The Monk

Lewis and Burgess present their novels in different forms – Burgess writes A Clockwork Orange in bildungsroman, presented in retrospective first person narrative and continually displayed within Burgess’ choice of ‘unreliable narrator’ (The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth, 1961), which is used by Burgess to show Alex’s justification of his crimes, and therefore his inability to objectively narrate; whereas Lewis’ omniscient “salacious and blasphemous elements of his narrative” (Nick Groom, 2016) in third person allows The Monk to be unbiased in its depiction of Father Ambrosio’s actions as the antihero. However, despite their differences in narrative perceptions, both Lewis and Burgess choose to structure their novels into three parts. In creating such structure of the three parts in A Clockwork Orange and The Monk, both Lewis and Burgess have divided their novels into parts necessary to the progression of the narrative. Burgess in particular structures his three parts of A Clockwork Orange regulatory: each seven chapters segmented under crime, punishment or recovery.

The initial era of gothic fiction, of which The Monk was a catalytic text, spanned from the late 18th century to the heart of the fin de siècle. The Monk’s 1796 publication was in the transient gothic era, from the romantic era, and proves the political context of The Monk, including the enlightenment era and the French Revolution, to have changed Western Europe’s societal thinking to the point of a major change in literary movements. Characteristics such as the use of dark sorcery