The technique
Stanley Kubrick uses in this movie is built upon the difficulty to understand the language the characters speak, as
BAR has pointed out above (or it
was above when I wrote this).
The scenery, the music, even the violence itself serves to keep us apart from the characters, and above the action. I remember being struck by the stylization of it all, especially the violence, its choreography, the minute examination each detail, the investigation of each scene until the characters seemed hardly human, certainly nothing to be empathizied--that is felt--with. And this is Kubrick's genius.
The voice-over narration of Alex is the only way into the movie--and perforce, into Alex. It seems to me this technique of distance mades the action almost comic, in the sense that only a character whom we can feel with, can we be sympathetic with--and without understanding, there is only comedy.
We are only allowed to feel with Alex. We are led to feel Alex's harrowing, because we know his mind, and we understand him.
We can even feel the evil done to him by that marvelous head, almost like Ludwig Van himself, staring up to the room where Alex is being torutred.
Such a remarkable use of language and cinema, to exclude, and then draw us in. The talent of Burgess, and then of Kubrick. Truely one of the greatest triumphs of literature in the twentieth century.