Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

People think it’s funny when a dumb person can’t do things the same way they can.

Would he ever learn to read what was in the balloons? If they gave him enough time—if they didn’t rush him or push him too fast—he would get it. But nobody has time.

Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

“I never would have done it but for you,” I said.

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.

I’m no more to blame than the knife is to blame in a stabbing, or the car in a collision. “But I’m not an inanimate object,” I argued. “I’m a person.”

“I was a person before the operation. In case you forgot—”

“No, it’s you. You touch my eyes and make me see.” She blushed and pulled her hand back.

There is no question about it now. I’m in love.

How different they seem to be now. And how foolish I was ever to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They’re people—and afraid the rest of the world will find out. And Alice is a person too—a woman, not a goddess—and I’m taking her to the concert tomorrow night.

It had been all right as

long they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.

This intelligence has driven a wedge between me and all the people I knew and loved, driven me out of the bakery. Now, I’m more alone than ever before. I wonder what would happen if they put Algernon back in the big cage with some of the other mice. Would they turn against him?

Listen, the best of them have been smug and patronizing—using me to make themselves superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron.”

As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.

The ice had broken between us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.

Now it’s impossible. I am just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70. And this time we both know it.

wanting someone to talk to and yet afraid to meet anyone.

As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I’m exceptional—a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of

gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.

What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months?

But still it’s frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don’t know all the answers.

I had come there as part of a scientific presentation, and I had expected to be put on exhibition, but everyone kept talking about me as if I were some kind of newly created thing they were presenting to the scientific world. No one in this room considered me an individual—a human being. The constant juxtaposition of “Algernon and Charlie,” and “Charlie and Algernon,” made it clear that they thought of both of us as a couple of experimental animals who had no existence outside the laboratory.

I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.

turning her away from me so that she gave me less love when I needed more.

he would resent me—as the others from the bakery resented me—because my growth diminished him.

Tonight, when you went into your place with that guy, I wished it was me.”

Somehow, getting drunk had momentarily broken down the conscious barriers that kept the old Charlie Gordon hidden deep in my mind. As I suspected all along, he was not really gone. Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there—watching and waiting.

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.

Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all.