Alex's "Reformation"

After the incident in prison where Alex unwittingly killed another person, he is sent from the Staja to another reformatory center, one that uses a much different technique to "fix" prisoners. Alex's daily routine involves being injected with what I assume are sedatives, and then being strapped to a chair and being forced to watch "the ultra-violent" as he calls it, for hours on end. Aside from this "torture session," Alex lives a relatively comfortable life. His daily meals consist of "ice cream and a nice hot chasha of chai," and his room is well furnished, with a large bed, as opposed to the cramped jail cell in which he previously was residing (99). His new surroundings seem less and less like a prison, and more like a hotel.

However, Alex soon begins to make some dire discoveries. The injections that they give him make him feel weak and hazy, the door to his room is locked at all times, and the windows have bars. This place seems to be more than it seems.

So how does this prison work, if it offers startlingly plush amenities but still relies on drugs and submission? Through a series of films, Alex has been trained to associate violence with nausea. As a result, when he goes to hit a stage actor, he simply cannot. Not for a lack of desire to harm, but because he is overwhelmed with a sense of sickness when he reaches to strike him.

This new type of reform takes away one of the basic fundamentals of freedom: choice. Alex is not driven by a desire to do good or a desire to avoid evil, rather, he simply cannot do anything that was programmed into his mind as being evil. For me, this was startling. Alex has become nothing more than a government automaton, who responds this a certain way to Stimulus X, and that way to Stimulus Y. A seemingly benevolent government interested in the well-being of society has now resorted to brainwashing to subdue its populace.

I'm interested to see how Alex responds to violence in the outside world.