SOURCE: "Pronominalization in A Clockwork Orange," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring, 1976, pp. 200-05.

In the following essay, Carson argues that pronoun usage in A Clockwork Orange is indicative of the power relationships between Alex and the other characters.

What discussion there has been of the language of A Clockwork Orange has dealt mainly with the gypsy talk of Alec, "nadsat," a hybrid of Russian and onomatopoetic words. Virtually no critic, however, has investigated a linguistic technique certainly as obvious as the nadsat lexicon: Alec's system of pronominalization. It is with the thou/you pronoun distinction, and not the nadsat vocabulary, that Burgess indicates the significant changes in the central character in the novel.

In "The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity," Roger Brown and Albert Gilman propose a "connection between social structure, group ideology, and the semantics of the pronoun." They base their conclusions on...