“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes – how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence.”
Flowers for Algernon is a novel composed of the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a man in his thirties who was born with a rare mental disorder called PKU, which severely impairs an affected person’s mental development, thus causing them to have a very low IQ. Charlie undergoes an experimental operation which has previously only been performed on animals, such as the lab mouse Algernon. The operation was meant to permanently raise his intelligence, but its effects only last for a few months before Charlie begins to mentally regress again to his initial low IQ.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this one. From the first few pages I knew it was going to be different, but I didn’t know I was going to be launched into something so raw and emotional yet unsentimental and serious. I think the use of a journal-style format makes the book particularly engaging, because it allows us to see the evolution of characters and situations through Charlie’s own evolving eyes: how he comes to realise that people who he’d thought were his friends were not laughing with him, but at him; that the man who helped him through the experiment was not a hero, but was merely “walking on stilts among giants”; that everyone in this world is working for their own gain; that a high IQ cannot compensate for the lack of meaningful human relationships; and that emotional maturity is just as important as intellectual capacity, if not more so.
“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. […] Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centred end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”
Part of what makes Flowers for Algernon so utterly fascinating is the layers of storyline that are uncovered as the effects of the experiment on Charlie take hold and subsequently wear off. As his intelligence increases, his memory improves, and he begins to recall painful and difficult memories from his childhood, including his complex relationship with his mother and the abuse he experienced from coworkers and “frends”. It was also interesting to see the parallel when Charlie is at both extremes of the IQ bell-curve. When Charlie finds himself at genius level intelligence, he finds, much like when he was ‘retarded’, that human relationships are impossible. He finds their conversation tedious and their company boring. He begins to view people with the same sort of contempt with which they used to treat him.
I think what makes Charlie’s mental regression especially disturbing is that, having now experienced high intelligence and come to understand the ways of the world, he is fully aware of what is happening to him, and of his inability to stop it. Where, closer to the start of his mental improvement, he felt like “an animal who’s been locked out of his nice, safe cage”, Charlie now struggles to let go of the relationships he’s struggled for so long to build, and which are now deteriorating again before his eyes. He recognises that the doctors involved in the experiment did not care about him at all, but were simply trying to play God in a world where mere science cannot hope to repair social failings.
“The problem, dear professor, is that you wanted someone who could be made intelligent but still be kept in a cage and displayed when necessary to reap the honors you seek. The hitch is that I’m a person.”
Flowers for Algernon teaches the importance of human kindness, without being preachy or pathetic, through the lens of the deeply conflicted Charlie Gordon. It’s an exceptional and profoundly important book for everyone to read. Somehow, it speaks to all of us with its questions of human nature and morality and truth. Do all human beings have intrinsic value, or do some need to be ‘improved’? Should scientific endeavour be pursued at all costs, even when its consequences cannot be predicted or measured? Is ‘progress’ always a good thing? Can acts that fundamentally affect human lives be weighed in cost/benefit terms? These are all interesting questions that Flowers for Algernon only begins to answer.
“P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowers on Algernons grave in the bak yard.”