Meaning of " A Clockwork Orange"

Finally I got to watch " A Clockwork Orange" and I ended up with no feelings at all. Sometimes, too much thought leaves you with no thought. Out of curiosity, I also decided to google the meaning of this title, "A Clockwork Orange". I found a nice elaborate explanation on Wikipedia which I am pasting below..


Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression "As queer as a clockwork orange." ¹ Due to his time serving the British Colonial Office in Malaya, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used to punningly refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay for "person"). The Italian title, "Un'Arancia ad Orologeria" was interpreted to refer to a grenade. Burgess wrote in his later introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked," that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil."

In his essay "Clockwork Oranges"² he says that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness." This title alludes to the protagonist's negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.

The book was partly inspired by an event in 1944, when Burgess' pregnant wife Lynn was robbed and beaten by four U.S. GI deserters in a London street, suffering a miscarriage and chronic gynaecological problems³. According to Burgess, writing the novel was both a catharsis and an "act of charity" towards his wife's attackers - the story is narrated by and essentially sympathetic to one of the attackers rather than their victim.