You Are Who You Are: 'Flowers For Algernon' by Daniel Keyes
When I visited Nottingham last year for my friend Josh’s (he makes another appearance on one of my articles. I hope you’re doing well, bro) birthday, a friend of ours, Miles (who always gives me great book recommendations - many thanks for that man!) referred to reading Flowers for Algernon. He described how it’s a book about a low IQ guy getting smarter as the book went on, shown in his writing (he said it in a way funnier fashion I promise). It piqued my interest nonetheless, because I was curious as to how such a premise shook out. And a year later I finally got round to reading it. It was an enjoyable read: I finished reading its 250 page in four days.
Flowers For Algernon is really about a retard (in the literal sense) Charlie Gordon who works as a sweeper in a bakery, attends a school for retarded adults, who desires to be intelligent so that he is liked by his peers. He undergoes an experimental procedure that promises to increase his intelligence, him being the first human to do so (the other famous subject of the experiment, a mouse, is the titular Algernon). The story is about Charlie’s transition from being very dumb to very smart, and the interpersonal ramifications of it all.
I really do like the structure of the novel. It’s essentially an epistolary novel - the story unfolds over the course of progress reports: reports that the scientists and psychologists in the story use to track Charlie’s cognitive changes. It’s clever in that it focuses Charlie’s internal experience of his changing mental capacity, allowing for really moving passages about his realisations about people and intelligence and people’s understanding of intelligence. The reports also embody Charlie’s level of intelligence at various points: his grammar, spelling, and punctuation improving as the book progresses, as well as his emotional depth being more realised too: one of the biggest successes of the book is that it really shows the complexity of our engagement with our emotions. There’s a personal, psychological structure to the scientific fiction that I really appreciate.
Keyes does well to present the nuances in characters such as Charlie’s love interests Miss Alice Kinnian and Fay Lillman, and the people involved in Charlie’s experiment Professor Harold Nemur and Dr. Jayson Strauss.
Charlie Gordon is the central character, and so in terms of how the characters are in the book, I think Gordon is a really likeable protagonist in his canine sincerity (and I don’t say this in an ad hominem sense either, it’s rather accurate). How his perception of things evolve is equally amusing and devastating: he’s a character who just wants to be loved by others yet as the story goes along we see his enchantment with people, his hope for the powers of intelligence slowly diminish, slowly die to disillusionment. He becomes aware of the limits of human understanding and the disappointing reality of most human relationships.
Keyes does well to present the nuances in characters such as Charlie’s love interests Miss Alice Kinnian and Fay Lillman, and the people involved in Charlie’s experiment Professor Harold Nemur and Dr. Jayson Strauss. Keyes presents how Charlie’s growing intellect challenges the self-perceptions of such characters with wonderful concision. For instance, Miss Kinnian’s initial fondness and encouraging attitude towards Charlie and his developing intelligence subsides to anger and insecurity towards her own intellect once Charlie becomes superintelligent. Her conflicts with Charlie are some of the most saddening passages of the book because both she and Charlie can’t help how they feel about the changing dynamic between the two despite having strong feelings for each other from the start of the novel.
What’s also wonderful is how ideas of being human are intertwined with such character development. For example, Charlie recognises that the doctors and scientists haven’t perceived him as a human being in his original state - so much so that they claim to have made Charlie who he is once he became sufficiently intelligent. The roles get reversed once Charlie becomes more intelligent because he later picks apart the theories posed by such scientists and doctors that they believe will revolutionise science and psychology, forgetting that they are indeed ordinary human beings trying to do extraordinary (perhaps, superhuman) work. This beautifully reveals the tension inherently in understanding what constitutes being human, and in who gets to decide what being human means.
What Flowers For Algernon highlights is that you’re born the way you are, and accepting and understanding who you are and how you’re truly perceived by others goes a long, long way, instead of being dissatisfied with what your perceived limitations.
I enjoyed, most of all, the philosophical bent that’s apparent in the central idea of the book. In Charlie’s pursuit to being liked by others and his misplaced faith in intelligence to fulfil such purpose, he realises that not only was he pulling away from people, but he was eliciting the opposite reaction that he was desiring. What he finds out at the end of the book is both true and tragic: there was nothing wrong with him to begin with barring his perception.
What Flowers For Algernon highlights is that you’re born the way you are, and accepting and understanding who you are and how you’re truly perceived by others goes a long, long way, instead of being dissatisfied with your perceived limitations. Despite being described to me as a book about a retard becoming very smart, Flowers For Algernon carries much more weight than that. It’s a book that has almost a Christian sense to it: God didn’t make a mistake when he made you, you just got to be the best you can be as you are.
Link to book: https://amzn.eu/d/c86OnGQ