Recovery and Government Reconciliation
The Recovery and Government Reconciliation is the pivotal event in which the state, having subjected Alex to the Ludovico Technique, reclaims him as a success story and symbol of its crime-control policy. After Alex's desperate leap from a window in the flat of the political opposition, he lies hospitalized, broken in body but, as the government will discover, restored in spirit. The Minister of the Interior's bedside visit, complete with photographers and a gift of a stereo playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, stages a public reconciliation that is also a private revelation: Alex's capacity for violence, and for the enjoyment of violence, has returned. The event closes the arc of Alex's conditioning and reopens the question of what kind of person—or what kind of clockwork—the state has actually produced.
Hospitalization and the Government's Approach
Alex wakes in a hospital room, his body bound in bandages and wire cages, his head wrapped, his teeth missing, and a nurse reading a romance novel by his bed. He has survived the fall but is barely able to speak, his words coming out as "er er er." The prison chaplain from Staja 84F visits, breathing stale whisky and declaring that he has left the prison service rather than subscribe to the Ludovico Technique, calling Alex "my little beloved son in J. C." Soon after, three men from the political opposition—Z. Dolin, Something Something Rubinstein, and D. B. da Silva—appear at his bedside, holding newspaper clippings with headlines like "BOY VICTIM OF CRIMINAL REFORM SCHEME" and "GOVERNMENT AS MURDERER." They tell Alex that the people are "on fire with indignation" and that he has "killed those horrible boastful villains' chances of re-election." Alex tries to accuse them of using him, but only manages "er er er." The nurse chases them out, warning against exciting the patient. Later, Alex's parents visit, his mother weeping, his father apologetic and reporting that the lodger Joe has been beaten by the police and gone back to his hometown, leaving the way clear for Alex to return home. Alex tells them he will consider it, but warns that things will have to be very different and that they must decide who is to be boss.
The Minister's Visit and the Gift of the Stereo
As Alex recovers, two young doctors test him with a picture book, asking what he would like to do to each image. To a bird's nest full of eggs, he says he would smash them against a wall; to a peacock, he would pull out its feathers; to pictures of beautiful girls, he would give them "the old in-out in-out with lots of ultra-violence"; to a picture of a man being kicked in the face with blood everywhere, he says he would like to be in on that; and to a picture of Christ carrying the cross, he says he would like to have "the old hammer and nails." The doctors pronounce him cured, using the term "deep hypnopaedia." Then the hospital staff announce a very special visitor. At two-thirty in the afternoon, photographers and newspapermen crowd the room, and the Minister of the Interior himself enters, dressed in the height of fashion, with an upper-class "haw haw" voice. Cameras flash as he extends his hand to Alex. Alex greets him with Nadsat insolence—"Well well well well well. What giveth then, old droogie?"—and when a harsh voice tells him to be more respectful, Alex snarls, "Yarbles. Bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine." The Minister quickly smooths things over, saying Alex speaks to him as a friend. He sits by the bed and tells Alex that the government regards him as a friend, that they have put him right, and that there are men—specifically the writer F. Alexander—who wanted to use Alex for political ends and would have been glad for him to be dead. "We put him away," the Minister says. Alex realizes that F. Alexander was told about Alex's role in his wife's death. The Minister promises Alex a good job on a good salary because he is helping the government. A photographer cries "Smile!" and Alex smiles "like bezoomny without thinking" as pictures are taken of him and the Minister together. Then a big shiny box is brought in: a stereo. A technician plugs it in and asks what music Alex wants. "The Ninth," Alex says. "The glorious Ninth." As the Beethoven begins to play, everyone leaves quietly. The Minister pats Alex on the shoulder and says "Good good boy." Alex signs a paper without reading it, then is left alone with the music.
The Return of Violence and the Meaning of Cure
Lying alone with the Ninth Symphony, Alex experiences "gorgeosity and yumyumyum." When the Scherzo plays, he can see himself "very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva." The slow movement and the last singing movement are still to come. Alex's final thought is definitive: "I was cured all right." The event thus completes a full reversal. The conditioning that had made Alex physically ill at the thought of violence, that had forced him to grovel and lick boots rather than fight, that had made music itself a source of nausea, has been undone. The government, in reclaiming Alex as a propaganda victory, has inadvertently restored him to his original state. The Minister's gift of the stereo is not merely a reward for cooperation but the instrument of Alex's liberation: the Ninth Symphony, which had been paired with the most traumatic of the Ludovico films, now plays without triggering sickness, and instead unleashes the old violent fantasies. Alex is once again a creature capable of choice—and he chooses the same violence he always did. The reconciliation is therefore a deception on both sides: the government believes it has produced a docile citizen, while Alex knows he has been given back his true self.
