Participants: Annelise, Brittany, Melora, Sharon, Sid, Northie, YZH, Chloe
MC: Sharon | Facilitators: Melora & Chloe
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960.The novel was published in 1966. Algernon is a laboratory mouse who has undergone surgery to increase his intelligence. The story is told by a series of progress reports written by Charlie Gordon, the first human subject for the surgery, and it touches on ethical and moral themes such as the treatment of the mentally disabled.
SYMBOL INTRODUCTION
Algernon
As Algernon and Charlie undergo the same operation and the same testing, Algernon’s developments are good predictors of Charlie’s future. When Algernon begins to lose his intelligence, it is a chilling indication that Charlie’s own intellectual gains will be short-lived. Algernon also symbolizes Charlie’s status as a subject of the scientists: locked in a cage and forced to run through mazes at the scientists’ whim, Algernon is allowed no dignity and no individuality. Charlie’s freeing of Algernon from his cage and simultaneous decision to abandon the laboratory makes Algernon’s physical liberation a symbol of, and a precursor to, his own emotional independence.
Adam And Eve And The Tree Of Knowledge
The story of Adam and Eve, mentioned by Hilda, the nurse, and Fanny at the bakery, and then alluded to again in Charlie’s reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, bears a symbolic resemblance to Charlie’s journey from intellectual disability to genius. Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which costs them their innocence and causes them to be cast out of the Garden of Eden. As the forbidden fruit does for Adam and Eve, Charlie’s operation gives him the intellectual capacity to understand the world that he previously lacks. Just as it does to Adam and Eve, this knowledge causes Charlie to lose his innocence, not only in the form of his sexual virginity, but also in the form of his growing emotional bitterness and coldness. Hilda and Fanny both imply that Charlie, like Adam and Eve, has defied God’s will by becoming more intelligent. Charlie’s discovery that artificially induced intelligence cannot last implies that God or nature abhors unnatural intelligence. However, Keyes leaves us to judge for ourselves whether Charlie deserves the punishment of intellectual regression.
The Window
Many of Charlie’s childhood memories involve looking through a window, which symbolizes the emotional distance that Charlie feels from others of normal intellectual ability. Shunned by his peers because of his disability, he remembers watching the other children play through a window in his apartment. When Charlie becomes intelligent, he often feels as if the boyhood Charlie is watching him through windows. The window represents all of the factors that keep the intellectually disabled Charlie from feeling connected to society.
Charlie’s increased intelligence enables him to cross over to the other side of the window, a place where members of society accept him. However, in crossing over, Charlie becomes just as distant from his former self as the children he used to see playing outside. When Charlie regresses into disability, he maintains an indefinable sense of his former genius self, but he says, “I dont think its me because its like I see him from the window.” The window is the unbridgeable divide between the two Charlies. The only point at which the brilliant Charlie feels that he is confronting the other Charlie face-to-face is when he drunkenly sees himself in a mirror, effectively a window to one’s interior self.
QUOTE DISCUSSION
1/3
“And he said that meens Im doing something grate for sience and Ill be famus and my name will go down in the books. I dont care so much about beeing famus. I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.”
Here, in his “progris riport 6th,” Charlie recounts a conversation he had with Nemur shortly before his operation. Nemur cannot guarantee that Charlie’s procedure will be successful, but he is trying to make Charlie feel good about his participation in the experiment nonetheless. Nemur’s attempts to impress Charlie with promises of fame and great contributions to science reveal his true motivations. It is Nemur who wants his name to “go down in the books,” not Charlie.
On the contrary, Charlie’s reason for wanting to be intelligent is purely social: he wants people to like him. Charlie knows that his intellectual disability has cut him off from most of society, but his powerlessness does not upset him. Charlie does not long to join society to increase his social standing; rather, he longs to join primarily because he is lonely. In Charlie’s mind, intelligence is the quality that will gain him entry into a world of friends. The resulting irony is that when Charlie does become incredibly intelligent, he finds himself even lonelier than before.This passage comes from Progress Report 14, when Charlie goes to visit his father, Matt, hoping to talk with him and learn more about his own childhood. However, Matt does not recognize Charlie, and Charlie cannot bring himself to tell Matt who he really is. This reluctance emphasizes the feeling of split identity Charlie experiences as he grows smarter. When Charlie notes his intelligence increasing, he starts to have a sense that the “other” Charlie—his former intellectually disabled self—watches over him, remaining present in the back of his mind. In this quotation, Charlie realizes why he feels he cannot and should not reveal his identity to Matt: Charlie is no longer that “other” self that he imagines, and therefore is no longer the same Charlie who was Matt’s son.
2/3
“I wasn’t his son. That was another Charlie. Intelligence and knowledge had changed me, and he would resent me—as the others from the bakery resented me—because my growth diminished him. I didn’t want that.”
Though Charlie longs to connect to and understand his past, he realizes that he has traveled too far to be able to present himself as the same person he used to be. He believes that rather than being happy for his son’s massive gains in intelligence, Matt would feel betrayed if he were to discover that the articulate and bright man before him is Charlie. Charlie thinks that Matt would feel “diminished” by Charlie’s intelligence, not just because Charlie is now far smarter than Matt is, but also because Matt invested so much energy into relating to his son as an intellectually disabled boy. For years, Matt dealt with the difficulty of having an intellectually disabled son, and he also faced the greater difficulty of trying to persuade his irrational wife to accept Charlie’s disability. Charlie fears that if a new, brilliant Charlie were to come along all these years later, Matt would feel that he had wasted all of his emotional energy and might even feel cheated. Charlie is effectively two people now, but neither person can have a whole life or a whole history.
3/3
“P.S. please tel prof Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.”
These words constitute Charlie’s second-to-last postscript in his final progress report. Having decided to go live at the Warren State Home and cut himself off from all the people he has known, Charlie writes farewells to Alice and Dr. Strauss, but he saves a special word of advice for Nemur. Throughout the novel, Nemur is portrayed as a humorless and intensely career-focused man lacking in human compassion. For a time, at the height of his genius, Charlie’s own intellectual self-absorption threatens to turn him into a similarly cold individual. Upon discovering that his bakery coworkers used to tease him for sport when he was intellectually disabled, Charlie becomes understandably angry and embittered, hating the idea that he was the subject of such mockery.
THEME DISCUSSION
1/3
Mistreatment Of The Intellectually Disabled
2/3
The Tension Between Intellect And Emotion
3/3
