Final scene with new droogs

The final chapter of A Clockwork Orange presents Alex, now eighteen years old, at a decisive turning point. He is no longer the leader of the old gang of Pete, Georgie, and Dim; instead, he commands a new set of droogs—Len, Rick, and Bully—who look up to him as their leader because of his age, his fame from the newspaper articles about his "cure," and his job at the National Gramodisc Archives. Yet Alex feels a profound and growing emptiness. The evening begins in the Korova Milkbar, where the four of them drink milk-plus with knives in it, dressed in the height of fashion: very wide trousers, loose black leather jerkins, open-necked shirts with scarves, and shaved heads with hair only on the sides, wearing big boots for kicking. Alex, feeling both very tired and full of tingly energy, abruptly orders them out into the winter night.

A Desultory Evening of Violence and Discontent

Walking down Marghanita Boulevard, where no police patrol, Alex directs Bully to attack an old man coming from a news-kiosk. Bully cracks into him, and the other two trip and kick him while he is down, then let him crawl off whimpering. Alex himself stands back and watches, giving orders rather than participating. The group then goes to the Duke of New York, where the same old women from the beginning of the story are present, greeting them with "Evening, lads, God bless you, boys." Bully orders Scotch for all and the same for the old women, but Alex suddenly says, "Ah, to hell. Let them buy their own," surprising his droogs with his newfound meanness. He has become miserly, wanting to hoard his money. When Rick jokes that the money was "took, not earned," Alex shrugs and puts his own money on the table, but orders only a small beer for himself. Len jokingly feels his head for fever, and Alex snarls at him. When Bully notices a photograph that fell from Alex's pocket—a newspaper clipping of a baby, gurgling and naked—Alex snatches it back, then tears it into tiny pieces and lets them fall like snow. The old women urge him not to tear up money, and Rick explains it was a picture of a baby. Alex, increasingly irritable, tells his droogs he is tired of them, calling them babies who only scoff, grin, and give cowardly blows. He pours his beer on the floor and announces he is leaving them for the night, telling them to carry on without him. Bully, with a gleam in his eyes, sees his chance to take over for the night, and Alex walks out alone into the street.

Wandering and the Vision of Age

Alone in the dark, windy winter streets, Alex walks with his hands in his pockets, feeling a strange softness growing inside him that he cannot understand. He notices that the old ultra-violence and stealing are dying out, the police being so brutal with those they catch, but he no longer cares. Even his taste in music has changed: he now listens to quiet, yearning Lieder—just a voice and piano—instead of the great orchestras he once loved. He wonders if this change is a disease or the lingering effect of the Ludovico Technique on his brain. Feeling tired and in need of tea, he enters a café full of ordinary, harmless people. There he sees a young couple: the man is Pete, his former droog from the old days. Pete, now nearly twenty, has a mustache, wears an ordinary day-suit, and introduces his wife, Georgina. Alex is stunned, unable to believe Pete is married. Pete tells him he works at State Marine Insurance, they have a small flat, and Georgina works as a typist. They are on their way to a party at a friend's house for "wine-cup and word-games." Pete says it is "harmless," and Alex repeats the word, understanding it fully. After they leave, Alex sits alone with his cold tea, thinking.

The Realization of Growing Up

Left alone, Alex reflects that he is eighteen now, an age at which Mozart had written concertos and symphonies, and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud had done his best work by fifteen. Eighteen is not young. He begins to see visions: himself coming home from work to a hot dinner, a loving woman welcoming him, and in the next room, a cot with his son gurgling. The newspaper clipping of the baby and the encounter with Pete all tie together. He feels a great hollow inside and understands what is happening: he is growing up. He thinks of youth as being like a mechanical toy, wound up and sent off in a straight line, banging into things helplessly. He imagines explaining this to his future son, but knows the son will not understand and will do all the things Alex did, and that his son will not be able to stop his own son, and so it will go on "round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself... turning and turning and turning a vonnny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers." He resolves to start looking for a woman who will be the mother of this son, a new chapter beginning.

Farewell to Youth and the Reader

The narrative concludes with Alex addressing the reader directly. He says he has been everywhere with them, suffering with them, and they have seen some of the worst people God ever made, all against him. But all it was, he says, was that he was young. Now he is not young anymore; he has grown up. He walks off alone, where the reader cannot go, into a future of "sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there," seeking a mate. He bids farewell, offering a final "brrrrrr" of lip-music to all others in the story, and asks the reader to remember "thy little Alex that was." The final words are "Amen. And all that cal."