SOURCE: "Optimism in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange," in Extrapolation, Vol. 14, No. 1, December, 1972, pp. 25-9.

In the following essay, Connelly argues that the untruncated version of A Clockwork Orange is a story of "life's movement, of growing up and of renewal."

Some ten years after its publication Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is finally beginning to receive justly deserved popular attention. It is unfortunate, however, that this attention is being given to a misleading and inferior version of the original novel. In both its British hardcover edition published by William Heinemann and its Pan paperback, the novel concludes with a seventh chapter to part three. This chapter is missing from the American Ballantine version as well as the recent Penguin edition. Furthermore, it is this incomplete version which Stanley Kubrick has so diligently followed in his successful film-script. Why the original ending should be absent is a question best...