A Freudian reading of A Clockwork Orange would obvi- ously focus on how identifying with Alex allows us to vicariously gratify our repressed desires for sadistic sex and violence. The opening sequences of the film, where Alex and his droogs beat up a drunk, thrash a rival gang, and break into a writer’s house, do precisely this. Burgess himself admits that “it seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writ- ing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers”

(Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick)

Alex wakens in a room, listening to the glorious Ninth, becoming ill. He can’t take it anymore, so he throws himself out of the window.

To be moral is to over- come one’s impulses; if one does not have any impulses, one is not therefore moral… . There is more hope for the man of strong impulses than for a man of no impulses.