Attack on the Drunk

The Attack on the Drunk occurs immediately after Alex and his droogs leave the Duke of New York, having just established an alibi with the old women inside. Outside, they encounter a burbling old pyahnitsa or drunkie, flattened against the wall, his clothes a disgrace of creases, mud, and filth, howling filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as though a filthy old orchestra were playing in his stinking rotten guts. Alex states that one thing he could never stand was that—a moodge all filthy and rolling and burping and drunk, especially when he was real starry like this one was.

The Assault and the Drunk's Defiance

The four malchicks get hold of him and crack him with a few good horrorshow tolchoks, but he still goes on singing. The song goes: "And I will go back to my darling, my darling, / When you, my darling, are gone." When Dim fists him a few times on his filthy drunkard's rot, he shuts up singing and starts to creech: "Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one." Alex tells Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest him sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. He asks: "Oh. And what's stinking about it?"

The old man cries out that it is a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like they done, and there is no law nor order no more. He creeches out loud and waves his rookers, making real horrorshow with the slovos, only the odd blurp blurp coming from his keeshkas, like something was orbiting within, or like some very rude interrupting sort of a moodge making a shoom, so that this old veck keeps sort of threatening it with his fists, shouting: "It's no world for any old man any longer, and that means that I'm not one bit scared of you, my boyos, because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead."

The Drunk's Critique of Society

The gang smecks and grins but says nothing, and then the drunk continues: "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 not more attention paid to earthly law nor order no more. So your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans." Then he gives them some lip-music—"Prrrrzzzzrrrr"—like they had done to those young millicents, and then he starts singing again: "Oh dear dear land, I fought for thee / And brought thee peace and victory—"

The Escalation of Violence

So they crack into him lovely, grinning all over their litsos, but he still goes on singing. Then they trip him so he lays down flat and heavy and a bucketload of beer-vomit comes whooshing out. That is disgusting so they give him the boot, one go each, and then it is blood, not song nor vomit, that comes out of his filthy old rot. Then they go on their way.

Thematic Significance

The Attack on the Drunk serves as a microcosm of the novel's central concerns: the casual, almost recreational violence of youth; the failure of law and order to protect the vulnerable; and the generational conflict that defines the society of the book. The drunk's defiance—his refusal to stop singing, his explicit death wish, and his critique of a world that has abandoned earthly law for space exploration—gives voice to the very social decay that Alex and his droogs both embody and exploit. Alex's momentary curiosity about the old man's worldview, cut short by the gang's escalating brutality, foreshadows his own later victimization and the novel's deeper questions about the nature of evil and the possibility of redemption. The episode also establishes a pattern of violence that will recur throughout the novel, from the attack on the old professor to the invasion of F. Alexander's home, and ultimately to Alex's own suffering at the hands of the state and his former droogs.