Flowers for Algernon in Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)

Apr 28, 2020 Maggie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction, classics, guardian-1000, coming-of-age, unreliable-narrator, epistolary, usa

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Charlie, an intellectually challenged 32-year-old man, undergoes an operation to double or triple his IQ. The operation is an experiment by Professor Nemur and Dr Strauss, with assistance from the psychologist Burt, who have recently performed a similar experiment on the mouse Algernon with impressive results. Within a matter of weeks, Charlie goes from struggling with spelling and grammar to becoming a genius, mastering many languages and talking about neo-Boulean mathematics and post-symbolic Charlie, an intellectually challenged 32-year-old man, undergoes an operation to double or triple his IQ. The operation is an experiment by Professor Nemur and Dr Strauss, with assistance from the psychologist Burt, who have recently performed a similar experiment on the mouse Algernon with impressive results. Within a matter of weeks, Charlie goes from struggling with spelling and grammar to becoming a genius, mastering many languages and talking about neo-Boulean mathematics and post-symbolic logic. However he loses his childlike wonder, becomes impatient, irritable and cynical, loses his job at a bakery as his colleagues feel threatened by him, and becomes more emotionally distant from people, including his ex-teacher and new romantic partner Alice Kinnian, than he was before the operation. His memory improves, and he sees flashbacks of his past and start understanding how he was emotionally abused by his mother from young and mocked by others without realising it. At the peak of his genius, he discovers the fatal flaw in the experiment – that he will lose this newfound intelligence, as Algernon already has. He finally achieves emotional fulfilment just before he reverts to his pre-operation state.

This book has been on my to-read list since I was 11 and was given an excerpt to read in school. Finished in just four days, it's the easiest book I've read this year, but possibly the most emotionally and psychologically complex. Unlike several newer books written from the perspective of an intellectually challenged person, this one isn't annoying. Keyes keeps the cries for sympathy and self-pity to a tolerable level. Charlie is genuinely a likeable person, and when he isn't, he just doesn't write, and so we don't have to face much of his anger and irritability. There aren't any gimmicks. In this way, the story engaged me emotionally, while focusing on exploring the impact of artificially enhancing intelligence on a person's life and the ethical considerations.

These are many. It is predictable that Charlie's life would change after the operation, that his old friends and acquaintances would not understand him anymore, and that he would not be able to continue working as a sweeper and packer in a bakery. As he goes from being looked down on to looking down on others, he is unable to connect with the people around him, and becomes as much of an outcast as he was before. As he says, "I am just as far away from Alice with an IQ of 185 as I was when I had an IQ of 70."

Then there is the question of whether it is right for man to create intelligence. As one of the nurses remarks right after Charlie's operation, Man fell because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Is it right to tamper with a God-given thing? The consequences for Charlie are far more detrimental than Nemur or Strauss expected. Moreover Nemur grows increasingly smug, treating Charlie as an experimental object who was barely human and only became human through Nemur's intervention. Surely this is not right, as people are people with emotions and minds even if they function differently from other people.

The impact that Charlie's transformation has on Alice is perhaps the most touching. She recommended him for the operation out of genuine care for him, and continues to love and support him throughout his rise and fall, even when he hurts her. She is patient and wise, and even when she is unable to keep up with Charlie intellectually, she continues to guide him in his social relationships. It is wonderful when he finally, briefly, falls to a level on par with normal human beings and is able to fulfil his romance with her, and tragic when he continues to fall and she is left alone with the memories that he has forgotten. ...more

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