SOURCE: "The Novels of Anthony Burgess," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer, 1966, pp. 525-39.

Pritchard is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he discusses the effect of Burgess's invented language, "nadsat," on the violent content of A Clockwork Orange.

A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed, and Honey for the Bears are (at least the first and last) Burgess' most popular books and they ask to be considered together. All of them concern the individual and the modern state; all of them are felt to have a connection with the quality of life in the 1960's, but they approach life obliquely by creating fantasies or fables which appeal to us in odd and disturbing ways. As always with Burgess' work, and now to a splendidly bizarre degree, the creativity is a matter of style, of words combined in strange new shapes. Through the admiration these...