A Clockwork Orange

Dim functions as Alex’s foil. Where Alex is fastidious, Dim is messy; where Alex masterminds their criminal activities, Dim follows; where Alex exults in music, Dim guffaws in disrespect. They are nearly diametric opposites, except, of course, when it comes to their love of anarchy and violence. Since the reader witnesses everything through Alex’s perspective, Dim’s character emerges via Alex’s admiration for certain qualities and disdain for others. In the first category, Alex sees Dim as an excellent fighter: “poor old Dim, for all his dimness, was worth three of the others in sheer madness and dirty fighting” (20). In the latter category, Alex is constantly disdainful of Dim’s messy appearance and his lack of manners: “only Dim, like the clowny animal he was, full of the joys-of, but looking all dirtied over and too much von of sweat on him, which was one thing I had against old Dim” (31). Later, Alex makes the egregious mistake of sucker punching Dim when he interrupts the music Alex is enjoying. This, coupled with his underestimation of Dim’s intelligence and capacity for independent thought, leads to Alex’s betrayal and arrest.

Indeed, there are hints of Dim’s true character sprinkled throughout the text. For example, when the droogs are out prowling the streets looking for trouble, Dim is actually looking up at the moon and the stars: “But poor old Dim kept looking up at the stars and planets and the Luna with his rot wide open like a kid who’d never viddied any such thing before” (22). What Alex takes for childlike idiocy might instead be an intelligent interest in things other than the childish violence and instant gratification in which Alex revels. Dim asks, rhetorically, “What’s on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?” (22). This is not only a reference to Dim’s intellectual curiosity—which the other droogs appear to be lacking—but also a nod to the emerging space-oriented programs underway in Russia and America. Dim’s connection to intellectual pursuits is also indicated by his choice of mask donned during their criminal sprees: he wears the mask of some “poet veck called Peebee Shelley” (13). For all his guffawing, Dim might actually harbor the soul of a poet.

Still, Dim is not above exacting revenge on his former tormentor. After Alex is released from prison and Dr. Brodsky’s reckless care, he runs into Dim, who is now a police officer. Dim cannot resist taking advantage of this turn of events—Alex neutered by the experimental treatment; Dim in a position to abuse his power—and beats him savagely alongside his new partner, former nemesis Billyboy. As Dim warns Alex, “Don’t call me Dim no more, either. Officer call me” (172). When Alex takes an ill-advised shot questioning Dim’s ability to read, Dim responds with a physical shot to Alex’s face. The reader does not encounter Dim again after this incident, but one can presume that the once violent droog easily shifts into his new role doling out State-sanctioned violence as a newly minted millicent.

Georgie is a different kind of foil to Alex: He aims to replace Alex as the de facto leader of the group at his most ambitious moments. He constantly questions Alex’s assertions of wielding absolute authority. When Alex surprises Dim with the punch at the milkbar, Georgie questions Alex’s justification; when Alex claims Dim needs to learn his place, Georgie asks, “What’s all this about place? This is the first I ever hear about lewdies learning their place” (35). Georgie chafes at Alex’s overbearing manner and arrogant assumption of leadership. Alex’s subsequent dream that night about Georgie turns out to be prescient: “In this sneety he’d got like very much older and very sharp and hard and was govoreeting about discipline and obedience” (42). The next night, Alex gets an inkling of Georgie’s intentions. The three droogs come to meet Alex outside his apartment, and they have obviously been discussing the hierarchy without Alex present. Georgie cuts Alex off immediately when he begins to torment Dim: “‘All right,’” he says, “‘no more picking on Dim, brother. That’s part of the new way’” (59). Alex will no longer have unmitigated control.

Georgie also wants to take their criminal activity to a new level. He is tired of the petty thievery in which the gang typically engages; he wishes to pull off “a mansize crast,” or heist (60). As Alex sees it, “[s]o my dream had told truth, then. Georgie the general saying what we should do and what not do” (60). Alex, again in a spectacular error of judgment, thinks he is humoring Georgie by agreeing to participate in his plan; he bests him in a fight, after all, and believes that he has reasserted his natural claim to leadership. However, the ill-fated heist at the Manse is at least partially a cover for Alex’s droogs to betray him. While Alex is serving time in the State Jail, he learns of Georgie’s death; in Alex’s absence, Georgie does take over the gang, leading them on another potentially high-scoring home invasion. Yet, in what Alex sees as “right and proper and like Fate” (89), Georgie is killed by the homeowner while the others escape. While Dim ends up becoming a police officer and Pete settles down in marriage, Georgie, in his hapless hurry to grow out of adolescent anarchy into “mansize” criminality, seals his tragic end.