What makes an angry person? Start with one infant, whose mother died when he was two. Draft him into a war. Then mix with a wife who dies of alcohol cirrhosis. Finally, misdiagnose with a terminal illness. Yields one Anthony Burgess, English novelist and social critic. After years of public service and the above-mentioned hardships, Anthony Burgess unleashed a barrage of over 30 novels during his later life. Denoted by biting social commentary, Burgess novels satirized all areas of the British society in which he dwelled, specifically targeting areas like, the treatment of the English youth, reform techniques for criminals, and the negative affects of World War II on British Society. On a larger scale, Burgess targeted the general oppressiveness of English Society.During Burgess life murmurs circulated throughout England concerning the growing number of hoodlums patrolling the streets at night. The rapid increase of hoodlum youths was a result of the English education system, which rigidly separated adolescents into the gifted and ordinary, supporting the talented while neglecting the mediocre. Consequently, those youths who had been, in a sense, abandoned by society collected in small groups to form gangs, with whom they perpetrated acts of violence to pass the time, and acts of theft to acquire funds. In turn, the response of society to the hoodlum gangs was to categorize them as an inhuman breed, rather than accepting the gangs as a consequence of societal injustices. Once society considered the youths inhuman, the government had the ability to dispose of them as it pleased. Once captured, the youths were subjected to Skinnerian aversion techniques, in an attempt to purge their ability to commit acts of violence. This procedure rendered its subjects unable to perpetrate malicious acts by conditioning the body to respond to violence by making the perpetrator fiercely ill. While effective, this method also eliminated the perpetrato...
