How the Great Gatsby and a Clockwork Orange show corruption in society
Through literature, many authors have attempted to represent the societies in which they live and what they think society may become in the future if things continue to be looked over such as political corruption. This is clear in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Great Gatsby’. Fitzgerald tries to encapsulate the corruption that lay beneath the extravagance of society in the roaring twenties. In contrast, Burgess’s novel, ‘A Clockwork Orange’, depicts a futuristic society in which the novelist fears about mankind’s capacity for corruption are explored.
In both novels, it is made quite clear from the introductions, that society is corrupt. The corruption of society is introduced more subtly in ‘The Great Gatsby’, compared to ‘A Clockwork Orange’. It is introduced through Nick Carraway in ‘The Great Gatsby’ in his description of the two eggs of Long Island. Firstly, Nick introduces where he lives in “West Egg”, “I lived at West Egg. The – well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them”. He then goes on to describe “East Egg” by saying, “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water”. The use of the word “sinister” symbolises the corruption that society is built on. The fact there is an upper and lower class to begin with shows how unstable society can sometimes be. As the novel progresses, the reader becomes aware of the division with in the upper and lower class and how people sometimes have to commit corrupt acts in order just to fit in.
In contrast, Anthony Burgess introduces corruption in society in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ rather brutally from the very beginning. Alex, the narrator of the story and also the main character, tells the reader that there “pockets were full of deng” therefore there was no need “to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his own blood while we counted the takings
In both novels, it is made quite clear from the introductions, that society is corrupt. The corruption of society is introduced more subtly in ‘The Great Gatsby’, compared to ‘A Clockwork Orange’. It is introduced through Nick Carraway in ‘The Great Gatsby’ in his description of the two eggs of Long Island. Firstly, Nick introduces where he lives in “West Egg”, “I lived at West Egg. The – well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them”. He then goes on to describe “East Egg” by saying, “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water”. The use of the word “sinister” symbolises the corruption that society is built on. The fact there is an upper and lower class to begin with shows how unstable society can sometimes be. As the novel progresses, the reader becomes aware of the division with in the upper and lower class and how people sometimes have to commit corrupt acts in order just to fit in.
In contrast, Anthony Burgess introduces corruption in society in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ rather brutally from the very beginning. Alex, the narrator of the story and also the main character, tells the reader that there “pockets were full of deng” therefore there was no need “to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his own blood while we counted the takings