Flowers for Algernon
I’d been wanting to add more classics to my reading list, and was excited when I found the 1959 classic, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, in The Little Free Library at a park nearby my house. If you haven’t read it, here’s a review—
Charlie Gordon is a man with a very low IQ who, because of his desire to learn and be smart, has been selected to undergo an experimental treatment to increase his intelligence, the same treatment that has proven effective on a lab mouse named Algernon. Charlie was abandoned by his parents and sister, though his sister is located and gives permission for the surgery. Charlie is 33 and has worked in a bakery for 15 years while taking night classes for people with mental disabilities.
The action of the novel takes place in just over nine months. The story is written in close first person in the form of diary entries, or “progress reports,” written by Charlie, a requirement of the experiment as a record of his experience. The novel takes the shape of a bell curve graph, starting with Charlie at his lowest intellectual point, gradually rising to his genius state where he peaks, and then starts to decline rapidly.
In the beginning, the progress reports are full of errors in spelling and punctuation. Charlie is put through a series of tests, including a Rorschach test which he fails because he is unable to think figuratively. His intelligence is measured against Algernon, the mouse, in a competition to see who can be the first to find his way out of a maze. The mouse wins every time.
Soon after the surgery, Charlie begins to show improvement. His diary entries start to become legible. With a thirst for knowledge, his intelligence grows at a rapid pace, to the point where he not only outsmarts Algernon, but his teacher, his doctors, and the director of the study.
I am caught up in the novel almost immediately, my disbelief suspended by the intimate first-person narrative. The most poignant aspects come in Charlie’s remembering of his past and the cruelty he suffered because of his limitations not only from his own family, but from the people he had considered friends in the bakery where he is employed. With his new intelligence, he thinks, “…they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don’t understand there are human feelings involved”(145).
People from Charlie’s old life don’t know how to interact with the new genius in their midst. They feared him when he was simple-minded, and they fear him when he becomes smart. Even Charlie gets confused. “What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months”(153)?
Charlie experiences sex with one woman, and love with another but complications arise when his emotions don’t grow at the same rate of his intelligence. His once sweet personality changes to anger. He is a man divided between the old not-so-smart Charlie and the new brilliant Charlie.
With his exceptional intellect, Charlie is the one who discovers the fault in the experiment by observing Algernon’s deterioration. It seems inevitable that Charlie will suffer the same fate and regress to his previous state or worse. He makes plans to enter The Warren State Home and Training School, a school where most of the students are beyond help, to end out his days.
I had hoped for a different ending, perhaps a less predictable one, but as Charlie starts to descend the bell curve, his intelligence and language suffer and his reversion becomes inevitable. As heartbreaking as the novel is, the ray of hope is that the record of Charlie’s personal sacrifice and experience will enrich the lives of others with similar disabilities. “So I gess its like I did it for all the dumb pepul like me in Warren and all over the world,” Charlie writes, on the final page.
Flowers For Algernon was the winner of the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and was the basis for the Academy Award winning movie, Charly. As a classic, it has stood the test of time with over five million copies sold. I found it to be an enriching and worthwhile read…so, to the stranger who placed it in The Little Free Library, thank you!
*Cautionary note: Keyes uses the language of the time to describe Charlie, which many will find offensive today.