Attack on the Old Professor
The Attack on the Old Professor is the inaugural act of ultra-violence in Alex's first-person chronicle, establishing the casual, ritualized cruelty that defines his world. It is a premeditated but seemingly arbitrary assault on a defenseless elderly scholar, carried out by Alex and his three droogs—Pete, Georgie, and Dim—as a warm-up for the night's entertainments. The attack reveals the gang's performative sadism, their contempt for intellectual life, and the complete absence of legal consequence in a city where the old bourgeois dare not walk after dark.
Setting and Target
The event occurs on a cold, dry winter night on Boothby Avenue, immediately after the gang leaves the Korova Milkbar, their bodies sharpened by milk laced with knives. The victim is a "doddery starry schoolmaster type veck" with glasses, carrying books under his arm and a cheap umbrella, coming around the corner from the Public Biblio—a library "not many lewdies used these days." He is the only pedestrian on the entire street, a fact that underscores the era's fear of night-time violence and the shortage of police. The old man is a representative of the older, educated bourgeois class that has become a rare and vulnerable target.
The Deceptive Approach and Mockery
The gang approaches with exaggerated politeness, forming a "very smiling and polite square" around their victim. Alex initiates a mock-civil conversation, expressing a rare pleasure in finding someone who still reads. When Pete snatches the three books—'Elementary Crystallography,' 'The Miracle of the Snowflake,' and 'The Rhombohedral System'—the gang feigns shock at finding "filthy" words, with Dim, the dimmest of the four, pointing to a picture and declaring the old man a "filthy-minded old skitebird." This theatrical indignation is a deliberate inversion of morality, where the act of reading is treated as obscene and the gang's violence is framed as a lesson.
The Physical Assault and Humiliation
The violence escalates from symbolic destruction to physical brutality. Alex rips up the tough-bound crystallography book, and the others follow suit, scattering pages like snowflakes over the creeching old man. Pete holds the professor's hands, Georgie hooks his mouth open, and Dim yanks out his false teeth—upper and lower—which Alex then crushes under his boot. The old man makes "chumbling shooms" as Georgie punches his toothless mouth, drawing blood. The gang strips him down to his vest and long underpants, and Pete kicks him in the stomach. They riffle his pockets, finding only a few old letters, a keyring, a leaky pen, and a meager three gollies, which they scatter. They smash the umbrella, tear his clothes, and leave him staggering off, moaning and disoriented.
Thematic Significance and Consequences
The attack is a microcosm of the novel's central concerns. It is a deliberate act of destruction aimed at knowledge and culture—the books are library property, and the professor is a figure of learning. The gang's performance of mock-righteousness parodies the language of moral instruction, while their actual pleasure comes from the infliction of pain and the display of power. The event also establishes the pattern of Alex's narration: he admits it was "only like the start of the evening" and offers "no appy polly loggies." The attack has long-term consequences: the professor reappears in Part Three, recognizing Alex in the Public Biblio and inciting a mob of old men to attack him, a delayed revenge that Alex, now conditioned against violence, cannot resist. The memory of the assault also haunts Alex's final vision of fatherhood, where he imagines his own son committing similar acts, suggesting an inescapable cycle of youth and violence.
