A Clockwork Orange

“Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.”

This passage both introduces the reader to the milkbar, where young teens who cannot drink alcohol can instead consume drugs not yet declared illegal, and to the nadsat slang that the teens use. “Peet” means to drink, and “knives” is slang for drugs. It also reveals that Alex is a self-conscious, self-reflective narrator; he consciously begins his tale with this particular evening, and he assumes a ready audience is waiting to hear it.

“We smecked and then grinned but said nothing, and then he said: ‘What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more. So your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans.’”

When Alex and his gang attack the drunken veteran outside of the pub, the veteran complains about the rapid pace of change in the modern world. The implication is that the future is in the hands of the “cowardly hooligans” and the distant scientists, rather than in the older generations. That these generations were unflinchingly loyal to crown and country goes almost without saying, though the veteran emphasizes the point by singing a couple of lines of a patriotic song. This kind of loyalty has been lost; Alex and his ilk are so far removed from the Government and the State—and disgusted by the past, not to mention pessimistic about the future—that they create their own (violent, amoral) code of conduct.