A Man and a Mouse

It's hard to believe how deeply the story of a man and his mouse companion can impact its audience. No, not Walt and Mickey - I'm referring to Charlie Gordon and Algernon, the protagonists from Daniel Keyes' classic SF novel, Flowers for Algernon. This has always been on my "too-read" list, but I never quite got around to it until last week. It was worth the wait and didn't disappoint. The book may have been published more than fifty years ago, but it has stood the test of time for good reason.

The story is told through a series of journal entries or "progress reports" recorded by Charlie Gordon, the first human test subject in an experimental procedure that has already transformed Algernon the lab mouse into a rodent genius. At the story's outset, Charlie - a mentally disabled young man who barely grasps what is happening to him but nevertheless is driven by a desire to please and be liked - is humiliated by his inability to compete with his mouse counterpart in solving mazes. He initially hates Algernon, who serves as yet another reminder that Charlie is "a moron" (in the vernacular of the day), doomed to be mocked by the normal people around him or (worse) dismissed as unworthy of their attention.

Charlie's frustration is short-lived. As reflected by his increasingly sophisticated progress reports, Charlie's intelligence grows exponentially until it far exceeds the mental capacities of the very scientists who devised the procedure that transforms him. His expanded intellect does not, however, bring Charlie joy or peace of mind. Instead, it leads him on an intense personal journey to understand who he really is, what role intelligence plays in defining his value as a human being, and what really constitutes the essence of a person. Through higher levels of insight, Charlie realizes a disturbing truth: he has allowed his heightened intelligence to make him as condescending toward the "normal" humans around him as they once were toward him. His focus on pure knowledge and intellect have left him empty, unfulfilled, arrogant, and disconnected from the lives of others. Ultimately, he comes to understand that only by forging meaningful bonds with those around him can he become a "real person" in the most critical sense.

When Algernon the uber-mouse begins to display erratic behavior, then regresses, it is left to Charlie to analyze the theory as well as the experimental evidence and conclude that the procedure that has augmented his intelligence, and Algernon's, is fatally flawed. Their meteoric rise in intellect will be followed by an equally dramatic fall. Charlie, better than anyone, realizes what lies ahead: he will lose everything he has gained, and more, plummeting to a level below that at which he started. He can do nothing to stop this, nor can any of his scientist sponsors or comrades. His only hope is to fight the mental decline as best he can, to "run up the down escalator" to try to slow the descent.

I found the last part of this novel agonizing, personally. I can imagine no more horrifying fate than to see your mental landscape crumbling around you, destroying the essence of who you are or who you have become. In many ways, this reminded me of the novel Still Alice, which chronicles the decline of a brilliant woman academic stricken with early-onset Alzheimer's. The difference here is that Charlie's journey of self-discovery has led him to a core insight: the "new and improved" Charlie is a fundamentally different person than the original volunteer for the experiment. That other Charlie, despite the limits placed on the scope of his existence by his mental disability, was a real person. He had created a life for himself, and relationships with coworkers who, if not truly friends, were at least emotional anchors that held him fast against the storms. As Charlie's intelligence recedes, he makes peace with the fact that he has only "borrowed" that other Charlie's life and must inevitably return it.

This is one of those books that echoes in the mind long after the final lines are read. Charlie, before the surgery, was limited in many ways, but he had a gentleness of spirit and capacity for affection that touched the lives of many "normal" people around him. The "cerebrally supercharged" Charlie comes to realize that, on some level, that other Charlie had a richer life. The reader, too, is left to ponder the valuation of emotion vs. intellect in the calculus of a person's life. And nobody can finish this poignant, tragic tale without reconsidering the way we as a society treat the mentally handicapped.

One of Charlie's last journal entries begs its readers to remember poor Algernon the mouse, to continue to visit his tiny grave and place fresh flowers there in remembrance of the sacrifice he made to advance human knowledge. Like Algernon, this novel deserves to be remembered fondly and revisited often.

#SFWApro