Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

So I still don’t know what IQ is, and everybody says it’s something different. Mine is about a hundred now, and it’s going to be over a hundred and fifty soon, but they’ll still have to fill me up with the stuff. I didn’t want to say anything, but I don’t see how if they don’t know what it is, or where it is – how they know how much of it you’ve got.

I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up. Everything is strangely slow-motion and blurred.

But even as I write these words, something inside shouts that there is more. I’m a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon’s knife. And I have to love someone.

What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like this.

It may sound like ingratitude, but that is one of the things that I resent here – the attitude that I am a guinea pig. Nemur’s constant references to having made me what I am, or that someday there will be others like me who will become real human beings.

I am learning to control my resentment, not to be so impatient, to wait for things. I guess I’m growing up. Each day I learn more and more about myself, and the memories that began as ripples now wash over me in high-breaking waves . . .

Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known – not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being – one of many ways – and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.

What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf mute – and still eagerly sanding benches.

There had been no talk of rehabilitation, of cure, of someday sending these people out into the world again. No one had spoken of hope. The feeling was of living death – or worse, of never having been fully alive and knowing. Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.

If it keeps up this way, they’ll have to start feeding him by injection. Watching Algernon squirm under those tiny bands this afternoon, I felt them around my own arms and legs. I started to gag and choke, and I had to get out of the lab for fresh air. I’ve got to stop identifying with him.

intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.’

Who’s to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who’s to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?

There was no way to stop the sands of knowledge from slipping through the hourglass of my mind.

I thought a lot about the things Alice said, and then it hit me that if I kept on reading and learning new things, even while I was forgetting the old ones, I would be able to keep some of my intelligence. I was on a down escalator now. If I stood still I’d go all the way to the bottom, but if I started to run up maybe I could at least stay in the same place. The important thing was to keep moving upward no matter what happened.