With the last chapter intact, the story is no longer about Alex. It’s about some hypothetical futuristic society where ultraviolence is the norm and is just considered to be some coming of age rite of passage, that you eventually grow out of. It takes the violence in the story and makes it mundane and pedestrian, to the point where we have to come up with insane torturous methods like the Ludivico Technique, just as we prescribe kids Ritalin or Adderall, only we would do so just to attempt to keep things under control. It’s a story that is, frankly, ridiculous in its hyperbole, to the point that it bears little resemblance to anything but science fiction.

Kubrick and Burgess’s American editor were absolutely right to leave off the last chapter, thereby transforming the novel into the portrait of an irredeemable sociopath. A sociopath who has been enabled to a far greater extent by a simultaneously far more lenient and vindictive society than our own, yes, but therein lies the warning. While we want to redeem those criminals who are victims of circumstance, what happens when we take it too far?

By apologizing for Alex as a victim of society and circumstance, who only owes his psychopathic tendencies to said circumstances, Burgess’s novel falls flat as a criticism of society at Large (get it?)

Don’t get me wrong—I greatly enjoyed the novel, and recommend it to anyone who liked the movie. But I honestly believe the last chapter would have been best left unwritten.