Department of English

This thesis argues that Anthony Burgess and J. G. Ballard uses the formal structures of their fiction to condition the reader, making the reader’s own experience in the text an argument concerning the fragility of moral agency. Reading A Clockwork Orange (1962) alongside High-Rise (1975) and Crash (1973), my thesis examines two complementary formal strategies in which Burgess works from the inside out, using Nadsat to reshape the reader’s ethical response to violence. Ballard works from the outside in, using architecture and technological mediation as systems that alter behavior and erode moral perception. In both of these cases, conditioning operations through immersion, repetition, familiarity, and aesthetic pleasure are used to dissolve moral resistance before judgment can intervene. Burgess and Ballard illuminate a shared model of moral agency under modern conditions, one that is more fragile than previously supposed, and most effectively threatened by systems that present themselves not as control, but as pleasure, freedom, and the natural texture of everyday life.