Imagining of Literature

My first impression of one of the most praised Ian McEwan’s books - “Atonement”- was not very positive. But as time passed and I thought a little more of the story and the idea I came to the conclusion that after all the book is not that cliché. What I found intriguing was the idea of the authorship seen through the states of maturing. What I mean is that the process of writing is linked with the process of growing. In other words, the unstable carried away lost in fantasies young Briony and her fairy-tale-like writing concerned with twisting and reinventing the reality changes through the years in a sensitive, profound, searching answers and atonement writing.

Whether it is an orangutan that moved the hands of the clock of evolution becoming human being or it refers to the not human mechanical interior of mind, Burgess’s book described the young generation of Britain in the “permissive” 60s exploring the themes of free will (“without free will the man is a clockwork orange”), good and evil, generation gap, sin. The book parodies totalitarian governments and using parody and black humor shows the dystopian society of the youth culture. The author shows the total alienation of Alex and his fellows, the representatives of the youth, by “nadstad” – the Russian based slang. In Alex’s speech often occur Russian words – viddy (to see), devochka (a girl), mesto (place) and so on, which make the book very difficult to read by English speakers. Total defamiliarization (the term Russian formalists invented for the theory). How did Stanley Kubrick transfer the book for the big screen? Brilliantly is the laconic answer. Although Burges expressed h...