"O my brothers": Reading the anti-ethics of the pseudo-family in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange

Alex's metaphorical "droog" brothers-the remaining members of his nuclear family-also falter as participants in his implicit support system. Rather than enjoying genuine feelings of compassion and fraternity, Alex and his droogs share nothing more than a brotherhood of violence and depravity. Ironically described by Alex as "a very smiling and polite square" (Burgess 1987a, 5), his droog brethren offer no loyalty to Alex beyond what his leadership and their sheer numbers allow them to achieve during their nightly rampages. As with any group of small children, Alex and his droogs vie for position and manipulate each other to satisfy their selfish desires. Their relationship even functions upon a hierarchy of sorts, with Alex asserting himself as patriarch while the others protest about democracy: "There has to be a leader," Alex argues. "Discipline there has to be. Right?" (30). Dim, the slow-witted brute, Georgie, Alex's traitorous subordinate, and Pete, the quartet's smooth-talking diplomat, round out the membership of Alex's gang. A self-assured and self-deluded leader, Alex foolishly considers his droogs to be mere "sheep" under his control. In a robbery gone awry, Alex's droogs shock his sense of fraternal propriety after they betray him by knocking him unconscious and abandoning him to the police: "Where are my stinking traitorous droogs?" (Burgess 1987a, 65). Alex laments, only to effect a double betrayal later when he implicates Dim, Georgie, and Pete by name for their role in the crime. As with his parents, Alex's droog brothers fiinction as his support system only as long as he serves to further their selfish ends. The same pseudo-self that allows Alex to be betrayed by his droogs deludes him into believing in their absolute loyalty and in his own unparalleled authority.

Alex experiences an extended family of sorts during his nightly adventures with his droog brethren, as well as during his days as a truant from school. Alex's encounters with his metaphorical extended family largely manifest themselves in acts of violence, and his deviant behavior underscores his inability to communicate with and to make sense of the world outside of his pseudo-self According to Frances A. Boudreau, buse is a response to perceived powerlessness" and "is used as a resource to establish control" (1993, 150). Alex's physical and sexual abuse of the members of his extended pseudo-family functions as his only means of interpersonal communication and offers him a perceived sense of authority. Going out into the night with his droogs, Alex deliberately searches for the powerless and the weak as potential members of his pseudo-family. In addition to assaulting a defiant, grandfatherly old man, Alex and his droogs terrorize the home of an "old baboochka," bludgeoning her on her living room floor amidst a throng of cats. While his physical assaults upon his elders prove horrifying, Alex's sexual abuse of his "nieces"-a metaphorical incestual relationship-offers one of A Clockwork Orange's most devastating and distressing portrayals of unregenerate evil. During a chance meeting at a record store, he lures two ten-yearold girls back to his house by referring to himself as "Uncle Alex": "These two young ptitsas were much alike, though not sisters. They had the same ideas, or lack of, and the same colour hair-a like dyed strawy. Well, they would grow up real today. Today I would make a day of it. No school this afterlunch, but education certain, Alex as teacher" (Burgess 1987a, 44). Alex's molestation of Marty and Sonietta demonstrates his inability to care for even the most vulnerable members of his "family," as well as his compulsion to dominate his community through abuse and control.