Attack on the writer's home

The attack on the writer's home is the most elaborately staged act of ultra-violence in Part One of A Clockwork Orange, and the one whose consequences ripple through the entire novel. It is the crime that Alex, years later, cannot escape: the writer F. Alexander becomes his reluctant host, his would-be political exploiter, and finally his would-be avenger. The event is also the first time Alex encounters the title of the book he is narrating, and the first time he destroys a work of art rather than a person or a piece of property.

Approach and Deception

After a night of driving in a stolen Durango 95, Alex and his droogs—Pete, Georgie, and Dim—arrive at a small isolated cottage just outside a village. The name on the gate reads HOME. Alex knocks gently and, when a young woman's voice answers, adopts a refined gentleman's voice to claim that his friend has taken ill and needs to use the telephone. The woman, the writer's wife, hesitates and then goes to consult her husband, leaving the door unsecured. Alex and his droogs, now wearing their maskies—Alex in Disraeli, Pete in Elvis Presley, Georgie in Henry VIII, and Dim in the poet Peebee Shelley—burst in roaring.

The Assault and the Manuscript

Inside, the writer F. Alexander, a youngish man with horn-rimmed glasses, is typing at a table covered with papers. Alex picks up the pile of typed sheets and reads the title: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. He calls it a fair gloopy title and reads aloud a passage about imposing mechanical conditions on a creature of growth and sweetness, then begins tearing up the sheets. The writer lunges at Alex, and Dim responds by fisting him in the mouth, drawing blood that spots the carpet and the torn pages. Georgie and Pete, who have gone to the kitchen, return munching cold meat and plum cake, their mouths full, which disgusts Alex. He orders them to drop the food and hold the writer so he can watch. Dim continues to beat the writer while Alex sweeps ornaments off the mantelpiece.

The Rape and Destruction

Alex then orders Dim to hold the writer's wife from behind while he rips her clothes and rapes her, describing her breasts as real horrorshow groodies. After Alex, Dim takes his turn in a beasty, snorty, howly way while Alex holds the woman. Then Alex and Dim hold the now-slobbering writer while Pete and Georgie take theirs. When the sexual violence is finished, the gang, full of hate, smashes what remains: the typewriter, the lamp, the chairs. Dim waters the fire out and is about to defecate on the carpet, but Alex stops him. The writer and his wife are left bloody and torn but alive, making noises on the floor. The gang flees in the waiting auto, with Georgie driving, and runs over odd squealing things on the way back to town.

Thematic Significance

The attack on the writer's home is the novel's most thematically dense act of violence. It is the only crime in which Alex directly destroys a work of art and a creative process, not just property or bodies. The title of the writer's manuscript—A Clockwork Orange—becomes the novel's central metaphor for the conditioning that later strips Alex of his moral choice. The writer himself, F. Alexander, reappears in Part Three as the leader of a political opposition group that tries to use Alex as a weapon against the government, and he nearly kills Alex when he suspects Alex's role in his wife's death. The attack thus binds Alex's past and future, his freedom and his enslavement, his identity as a violent agent and his later identity as a conditioned victim. It is the crime that, more than any other, refuses to stay in the past.