The Beginning of the End

The story that has the most interesting introduction is Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. The cool part of that story is that the narrator wants to distance himself from the story. Normally the point of a story is to have the distance between the reader and the characters be as small as possible. Russell Banks effectively uses the introduction to have "Ron" have a really close distance to the reader and then effectively have the distance of the characters change around.
       One of my favorite books is A Clockwork Orange. In a way, the beginning is almost like Sarah Cole. However, that is only because the two stories start out so differently from almost all other novels or stories.The cool thing about the introduction of A Clockwork Orange is that there is a plethora of new vocabulary. One of the first sentences of the novel is "The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither." There is no glossary or anything for the words that the author introduces, so you have to use context clues to figure out what the author is saying. The first time I read the book, I referred to the vocabulary list only a few times to make sure that I was defining the words correctly. The beginning is harder to understand because as a reader you aren't used to the new words. Without knowing it, the work gets easier to read because you get used to the new vocabulary.
       As crazy as the beginning of the story is with all of the new words, the most interesting part of A Clockwork Orange is the ending. Most people are familiar with the film directed by Stanley Kubrick, but what most don't realize is that the ending of the film isn't the true ending of the story. In the British version of the novel, there are 3 parts with seven chapters each. That makes 21 chapters in total and it was done on purpose because the number 21 is associated with human maturity. However, when it came time to publish the book in America, the publisher wanted to cut the last chapter out, which is what Kubrick based his movie off of. Since the author, Anthony Burgess, was just grateful that his book was getting bought by anyone, he allowed it to happen. The final chapter changes the whole purpose of the novel. *Do not read any further if you do not want the A Clockwork Orange spoiled for you* The novel itself is ultra violent because Burgess was trying to cope with the murder of his wife at the time and explore why humans do such things. The main character, Alex, ends up getting "treated" for his violent ways by getting brainwashed. The 20th chapter ends with him reverting to his old ways because he was struck on the head and the brainwashing was reversed. The 21st chapter ends with Alex changing and becoming less violent on his own. Burgess did this because he wanted to show that people could changed. As I stated earlier, with a single chapter omitted, the entire story changes. Without it, it is just a story of pointless violence. With the 21st chapter included, it becomes a story of the human ability to change and outgrow nasty habits. The final chapter is one that promises hope for humanity as a whole instead of hopelessness.