Daniel Keyes was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. After working as a merchant seaman, he attended Brooklyn College, where he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees. He went on to become a fiction editor at Marvel Science Fiction. Keyes also worked as a high school teacher for developmentally disabled adults. He had been periodically publishing science fiction stories since the early 1950s, and, in 1959, his experience in the classroom with mentally retarded students, combined with his love of science fiction, led to the composition of a short story called "Flowers for Algernon."

The story, which told of a retarded man whose IQ is tripled as the result of an experimental operation, was widely acclaimed and enormously popular. The story received one of science fiction's highest honors, the Hugo Award, for best story of the year. In 1961, a successful television adaptation, The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon was produced, starring Cliff Robertson as Charlie. Still interested in the character of Charlie and the ideas contained in the short story, Keyes set to work enlarging "Flowers for Algernon" into a full-length novel. The result, published in 1966, won the Nebula Award (science fiction's other highest honor) for best novel of the year, and expanded dramatically on the popularity of the short story. In 1968, the novel version was adapted again, this time for a feature film called Charly. Cliff Robertson reprised his role as Charlie Gordon and won an Academy Award for his performance. The story has since been adapted many more times in multiple media, notably in 1978 as a short-lived Broadway musical, Charlie and Algernon, and as another television drama in 2000 starring Matthew Modine.

The novel version of Flowers for Algernon became the high point of Daniel Keyes's career, and it is by far his most popular and most acclaimed work, having been consistently in print for nearly forty years. He has not been a prolific author—since his success with Algernon he has written only three more novels and three works of journalism exploring true crime cases. Like Algernon, both his fiction and non-fiction alike are primarily focused on the extraordinary complexities of the human mind (one book of journalism, The Minds of Billy Milligan, tells the true story of a convincted murderer with multiple personality disorder, who claimed to embody twenty-four different personae). In 2000, Keyes published a book called Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer's Journey, chronicling his relationship with the his most famous story, from his first inspiration to write it to his reflections on its enduring success decades later.

The widespread interest in Flowers for Algernon to this day is a testament to the fascination of its premise, where as all people sometimes wonder how their lives would be affected by becoming more, or less, intelligent, Keyes gives us a voyeuristic glimpse into what such a journey might be like. Though Keyes's background was in science fiction and the novel undoubtedly belongs to that genre, it also transcends the limitations of the genre. Whereas many sci-fi writers alienate mainstream readers by focusing on technology and the inhuman aspects of the worlds they create, Keyes chose to use science fiction as a springboard for an exploration of universal human themes, such as the nature of intellect, the nature of emotion, and how the two interact. Though the novel depends on science fiction to drive its plot—of course no intelligence-enhancing surgery as described in the novel has ever been attempted—its characters and situations are quite ordinary. The characters are New York City scientists, teachers, bakers, and barbers—not the space rangers and galactic swashbucklers often associated with sci-fi. By integrating science fiction's potential for philosophical inquiry—exploring the extremes of human nature by imagining an altered version of our world—with realistic characters in a realistic environment, Keyes forged a work that has enthralled people who are indifferent to science fiction as well as fans of the genre.

Charlie Gordon - The protagonist and author of the progress reports which make up the text of the novel. Charlie is a 32-year-old, mentally retarded man, who lives in New York City and works at Donner's Bakery as a janitor and delivery boy. He is friendly and eager to please, and these qualities, combined with childhood feelings of inadequacy, make him the hardest working student in Alice Kinnian's literacy class for retarded adults. When an experimental operation is performed on Charlie to increase his intelligence, his IQ skyrockets to genius levels. His obsession with untangling his own emotional life and longing to reach an emotional maturity and inner peace to match his intellectual authority illustrate many of the themes of the novel.
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Alice Kinnian - Charlie's teacher at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults. Alice originally recommends Charlie for the experimental operation because she is impressed by his motivation. Although she is not one of the scientists that perform the experiment on Charlie, she acts as an unofficial member of the team because of her concern for Charlie. She is interested in intellectual pursuits but is ultimately more motivated by emotion. She becomes the one woman with whom Charlie briefly finds loving fulfillment.
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Professor Harold Nemur - The scientist in charge of the experiment that heightens Charlie's intelligence. An arrogant and career-obsessed man, Nemur treats Charlie as a laboratory animal rather than a human being and is given to implying that he "created" Charlie, as if the mentally-challenged Charlie is not a human. Nemur is tormented somewhat by his wife, who seems more fixated on his career than he is.
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Dr. Strauss - The neurologist and psychiatrist who performs the experimental operation that raises Charlie's intelligence, and Nemur's partner in the experiment. Dr. Strauss conducts Charlie's therapy sessions after the operation, and unlike Nemur, he maintains interest in and concern for Charlie's emotional development.

Burt Selden - A friendly graduate student, working on his thesis, who assists Strauss and Nemur in conducting the experiment. He oversees the testing of both Charlie and Algernon. Burt introduces Charlie around to both students and faculty at Beekman College.

Algernon - The white mouse that is the first successful test subject for the experimental operation that is later performed on Charlie. After the operation, Algernon becomes three times as intelligent as a normal mouse and learns to solve complex puzzles.

Fay Lillman - Charlie's neighbor in the apartment complex into which he moves after running away from the experiment. Fay is an attractive, free spirited, and sexually liberal artist, whose favorite pastimes are drinking and dancing. She embarks on a brief affair with Charlie, knowing nothing about his background.

Rose Gordon - Charlie's mother, a domineering woman who was terribly ashamed of Charlie's childhood retardation. For the early part of his childhood, Rose refused to accept that he was abnormal, despite her husband's appeals for her to be rational. Finally she had another child, Norma, and focused all of her energy on her. Rose punished Charlie for any sign of sexual interest, since she could not accept the notion of her retarded son having any form of sexuality.
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Matt Gordon - Charlie's father, a barbershop supply salesman who has wanted to, and eventually does, open his own barbershop. In Charlie's childhood, Matt tries to protect him against his mother's hostility, but Rose too easily bullies him.

Norma Gordon - Charlie's younger sister who grows up to be caretaker for their mentally unstable mother. During their childhood, Norma resents Charlie for getting what she perceives as special treatment, and she is cruel to him. When she reencounters him as an adult, though, she is glad to see him and regrets her youthful spite.

Uncle Herman - Charlie's uncle, who took care of Charlie after Rose expels him from her home. Herman was generous to Charlie, protected him from neighborhood bullies, and set him up with his long time job at Donner's Bakery. Herman has been dead for years at the novel's beginning.

Mr. Donner - The owner of the bakery where Charlie works. Mr. Donner, a friend of Uncle Herman's, has agreed to hire Charlie so that Charlie would not have to go to the Warren State Home when Herman died. Donner had given Herman his word that he would look out for Charlie's interest, and Donner stands by his pledge and treats Charlie like family.

Frank Reilly and Joe Carp - Employees at Donner's Bakery who often pick on Charlie. Frank and Joe make jokes at Charlie's expense that Charlie cannot understand, and they play tricks on him. However, they think of themselves as friends to Charlie, and when others pick on Charlie, they will defend him.

Gimpy - A baker at Donner's who secretly steals from his boss. His nickname is "Gimpy" because of his limp. Gimpy's relationship to Charlie is much like Frank and Joe's.

Fanny Birden - The only bakery employee who is consistently nice to Charlie. Fanny does not like to see the others pick on him because of his disability. When Charlie becomes a genius, though she is glad for him, Fanny is highly suspicious and wonders if he has made a deal with the devil.

Dr. Guarino - A quack doctor to whom Charlie was taken as a child. Dr. Guarino promises Rose that he can scientifically increase Charlie's intelligence, but his methods are a sham. Guarino is kind to Charlie.

Hilda - The nurse on duty when Charlie is first recovering from his operation. Hilda believes that perhaps Charlie is defying God's will by trying to artificially gain intelligence.

Minnie - An ordinary female mouse that Fay buys to be a companion for Algernon.

Meyer Klaus - A brutish new employee at the bakery who is working when Charlie briefly reassumes his job there after gaining and losing his intelligence.

Charlie Gordon - Charlie is the narrator and the focal character of the novel, whose miraculous change from a mentally disabled man into a genius sets the stage for Keyes to address the various themes within. He starts out a trusting and friendly retarded man, believing that the people in his life, most notably his co-workers at Donner's Bakery, are as good intentioned as he is. But as Charlie's intelligence grows, he gains perspective on both his past and his present, and he realizes that people have often taken advantage of him and have been cruel to him for sport because they knew that he would not understand. And when people have been kind to Charlie, he realizes, it usually has been out of condescension—they enjoy feeling superior to him. These realizations make Charlie suspicious of everyone around him. Interestingly, after the experimental operation on his brain, his intelligence has been elevated so far that his new genius distances him from people as much as his disability previously had. Charlie eventually convinces himself that he has lost feeling even for Alice Kinnian, the one person by whom he has never felt betrayed and for whom he has maintained a deep affection throughout his mental rise.
Feeling isolated from humanity, Charlie pursues his self-administered education and struggles to untangle his emotional life. He comes to feel that his mind contains two people: the newer genius Charlie, who wants to reach emotional maturity, and the older, disabled Charlie, whose actions are largely informed by the fear and shame instilled in him by his mother. In order for the new Charlie to reach his goal, he must come to grips with the traumas of the old Charlie. Although Charlie resents his mistreatment while disabled, he harbors hostility toward his old self and, furthermore, possesses the same disrespect for his intellectual inferiors as everyone else used to be of him. It is only in his final weeks of heightened intelligence, before he reverts to retardation, that he learns to forgive his family and give and receive love. His brief moment of emotional grace comes with the fulfilling romantic affair he has with Alice. Finally, when Charlie is retarded again at the end of the novel, a newfound sense of self-worth remains with him even though his intelligence has come full circle.

Alice Kinnian - Alice Kinnian is the one person with whom Charlie comes to experience a truly fulfilling personal relationship, and so it is fitting that throughout the novel she represents the human warmth and kindness that exists despite the intellectual and scientific focus of many of the other characters. She works as a literacy teacher to retarded adults because she cares about and enjoys working with her students and does not see them as lesser human beings for their disabilities. She takes genuine satisfaction in helping people, and she recommends Charlie for Nemur and Strauss's experiment because she admires Charlie's desire to learn. She is a constant presence in Charlie's earliest progress reports even though she is not a member of the scientific team that is examining him because of her concern for Charlie's personal well being. In this concern and affection lie the seeds of her eventual romantic love for Charlie. Though she is often deeply confused throughout their relationship, uncertain of what is and is not appropriate in their unique situation, her care for Charlie is unwavering as his IQ boomerangs from 68 to 185 and back again. Alice's ability to accept him as a person at any stage of intelligence sets her apart from the other characters in the novel, who judge Charlie first and foremost on his intellect. Though she is driven by emotion, Alice is not at all anti-intellectual; on the contrary, she is fascinated by academia and high culture. Though intellect and emotion often seem to be opposed throughout the novel, Alice's intellectual leanings demonstrate that a person does not need to sacrifice his or her ability to love in order to enjoy a life of the mind.

Professor Nemur - As Alice represents the possibility of an emotionally healthy adulthood, Nemur is the opposite, a man with a great intellect but little ability to relate to others. Unlike his partner Dr. Strauss, Nemur is never interested in Charlie's emotions but cares only about Charlie's quantifiable progress as an experimental subject. He thinks of Charlie precisely as he thinks of Algernon: as a laboratory animal. Pressured by a domineering wife, Nemur is desperate to advance his career and be thought of as brilliant by his peers. Nemur cannot stand to be shown up by anyone, not by Strauss, and certainly not by Charlie, and, thus, Nemur is deeply flummoxed when Charlie surpasses him intellectually and takes command of the experiment. Although Charlie resents Nemur for most of the novel, we can see how post-operation Charlie potentially is at risk of becoming just like Nemur: brilliant but cold, and without love.

Rose Gordon - Obsessed by an imaginary ideal of normalcy, Rose Gordon's initial response to her son Charlie's mental disability is denial. She insists that Charlie was normal, and she develops a delusional theory that Charlie is brilliant but is cursed by jealous neighborhood mothers. Any suggestion by her husband Matt that she should accept her son's retardation was met with anger. Charlie often earns her wrath just by the fact that he continues to be retarded. Later, Rose gives birth to a girl, Norma, whose name Rose chose because it sounds like "normal," and Norma is not retarded. After Norma's birth, Rose turns her full attention to Norma's success. Rose now tries to ignore Charlie altogether. Signs of Charlie's progression toward adulthood, most notably manifestations of sexuality, infuriate Rose. She demands that Charlie be removed from her home, and, by denying his existence, she also denies what she perceives to be her failure as a mother. When Charlie, now brilliant after his operation, visits an aged Rose near the end of the novel, her capacity for denial has grown into full-fledged dementia. She switches back and forth from recognizing Charlie to thinking he is a stranger, and back and forth from pride at his recent accomplishments to an insane fear that he has come to molest his sister. In her old age, Rose has been driven entirely mad by her overwhelming yet doomed desire to be what she perceives as normal.

Themes

Mistreatment of the Mentally Disabled - With its uniquely fictional concept of mutable intelligence, Flowers for Algernon offers a telling portrayal of how society mistreats the mentally disabled. As Charlie grows more intelligent after the operation and effectively transforms from a retarded man to a genius, he realizes that people have always based their attitudes toward him on a feeling of superiority. For the most part, they have treated him not only as an intellectual inferior but essentially as less of a human than they are. While some have treated him with outright cruelty, as the men at the bakery who have played tricks on him, others who have tried to be kind still ultimately have been condescending with their charity.
But Charlie's own relationship with the mentally disabled after his operation illustrates some important facets about this treatment of the disabled, since Charlie himself drifts into an attitude toward the less intelligent reminiscent of the attitudes that he has experienced from others. Consciously, he wants to treat his new inferiors as he wishes others had treated him, as when he sees a retarded busboy being laughed at by the patrons of a diner, and he demands that the people recognize the boy's humanity. But, when he visits the Warren State Home, he is horrified by the dim faces of the retarded people he meets, and he is unable to muster any warmth toward them. Charlie fears the patients at Warren State because he does not want to accept that he was once like them and may soon be like them again. We may even interpret this reaction as Charlie's own embodiment of the same fear of abnormality that drives his mother to madness. Thus, while Keyes may be condemning the act of mistreating the mentally disabled, he certainly creates a case as to why it may happen again and again, through the eyes of someone who has experienced the ridicule first-hand. This dual perspective on the part of Charlie allows him to truly come to understand that he is as human as anyone else no matter how developed or undeveloped is his intelligence.

Intellect vs. Emotion - With Charlie's mental retardation affecting both his intellectual and emotional development, the novel illustrates the difficulty of developing both aspects simultaneously without conflict. Charlie starts out warmhearted and trusting, but, as his intelligence increases, he grows cold, arrogant, and unlikable. The more he understands about the world, the more he recoils from human contact, and while at his loneliest point in Progress Report 12, Charlie shockingly decides that his genius has effectively erased his love for Alice.
Nemur and Fay seem to represent the incompatibility of intellect and emotion. Nemur is brilliant but humorless and friendless. Conversely, Fay acts foolishly and illogically because she is ruled entirely by her feelings. It is only with Alice's encouragement at the end that Charlie realizes he does not have to choose between his brain and his heart and that he does not have to become like either Nemur or Fay. He learns to integrate intellect and emotion, finding emotional pleasure in intellectual work and vice versa. It is in this phase that he finds true fulfillment with Alice.

The Persistence of the Past in the Present - With the restoration of childhood memories from his past, Charlie's life post- operation illustrates how the past is embedded even in his understanding of the present. This embodiment takes the form of the other Charlie that surfaces at key points in Charlie's experience. He hallucinates the retarded Charlie as a separate entity who exists outside of himself. So, one way of looking at it is that the past, as represented by the other Charlie, literally keeps watch over the present. When Charlie longs to make love to Alice, the other Charlie panics and distracts him—a metaphorical manifestation of the fact that the shame instilled in Charlie by his mother is still powerful, even if Charlie cannot remember the origin of that shame. Charlie cannot move forward with his emotional life until he understands and deals with the traumas of childhood. Similar ties to the past control Charlie's mother, Rose. When Charlie returns to see her, even after his intelligence levels have increased dramatically, she still harbors her old resentment over Charlie's lack of normalcy. Her extreme action, when she attacks Charlie with a knife, illustrates that her past also interferes with her actions and concerns in the present. She cannot dissociate her memories of the retarded Charlie from the genius Charlie that comes to visit her in the flesh and, thus, becomes a tragic reminder of the past's pervasiveness, even in the present.

Motifs

Changes in Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation - Charlie's initial leaps forward in mental ability are conveyed less by what he writes than by how he writes, and the method by which Keyes accomplishes establishes a tone is with the level of accuracy or inaccuracy in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The first sentence of the novel, typical of Charlie's early reports, is rife with errors: "Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on." In Progress Report 9, we can see Charlie's immense progress in his composition of flawless sentences such as, "I had a nightmare last night, and this morning, after I woke up, I free-associated the way Dr. Strauss told me to do when I remember my dreams." Similarly, Keyes initially conveys the loss of Charlie's intelligence at the end with the erosion of his grammar, spelling, and punctuation abilities.

Flashbacks - Starting in Progress Report 9, Charlie is overwhelmed by a series of flashbacks to events from his youth, which are provoked by experiences in the present. On such example occurs when Charlie is propositioned by the pregnant woman in Central Park and remembers his mother's pregnancy with his sister. All of the memories come as revelations to Charlie, and all of these flashbacks are to events of which he has not been previously conscious. As such, they all hold new lessons for Charlie about his past, and they all shed new light on his present neuroses. The flashbacks are interspersed through the narrative so that the stories of Charlie's present and past intertwine and reflect upon each other.

The Scientific Method - Charlie and Algernon are subjects in scientific experiments, and Charlie actually ends up internalizing much of the scientific methodology to which he is subjected. Not only does Charlie become well versed in academic science himself, surpassing Nemur's knowledge, he also approaches his emotional problems in a scientific manner. When he realizes that he is incapable of making love to Alice because his emotional attachment to her triggers feelings of shame, he devises a scientific experiment to test this principle: he decides that he will try to pretend that Alice is Fay (to whom he is not so emotionally attached) and see if that will allow him to make love without panicking. But Charlie is unable to go through with this experiment, though, because he realizes that he would be casting Alice in the dehumanizing role of laboratory animal, a role which he finds deplorable. The scientific pursuit of knowledge becomes Charlie's guiding principle. And, in the end, when he knows his intelligence will desert him and he contemplates suicide, he decides that he must go on living and keeping progress reports so that he can pass on knowledge of his unique journey.

Symbols

Algernon - Since Algernon and Charlie undergo the same operation and the two both undergo similar testing, Algernon's developments are good predictors of Charlie's future. Therefore, when Algernon begins to lose his intelligence, it is a chilling indication for Charlie that his own mental gains will be short-lived. Algernon also represents Charlie's condition as a subject of the scientists: locked in a cage and forced to run through mazes at the scientists' whim, Algernon is given no dignity and no credit for individuality. When Charlie frees Algernon from his cage and simultaneously decides to abandon the laboratory, he is making Algernon's physical liberation a symbol of and a precursor to his own emotional independence.

Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge - The story of Adam and Eve, mentioned both by Hilda the nurse, Fanny at the bakery, and then alluded to again by Charlie's reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost, bears a symbolic resemblance to Charlie's journey from retardation to genuis. Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and thereby lose their innocence and are cast out of the Garden of Eden. Charlie's operation, like fruit from the tree of knowledge, gives him the mental capacities that he previously lacked, which, in turn, afford him more understanding of the world around him. And just as it did to Adam and Eve, this knowledge causes Charlie to lose his innocence, not only in the sense of losing his sexual virginity, but more detrimentally by growing emotionally bitter and cold. Hilda and Fanny both imply that, like Adam and Eve, Charlie has defied God's will by becoming more intelligent. Charlie's discovery that artificially- induced intelligence cannot last, caused by a deterioration which he terms the "Algernon-Gordon Effect," would seem to imply that nature or God abhors unnatural intelligence. But Keyes leaves us to judge for ourselves if Charlie deserves the punishment of regression, and even if he has received it at the end of the novel.

The Window - Many of Charlie's childhood memories involve looking through a window, which symbolizes the emotional distance that Charlie feels from others of normal mental ability. Shunned by his peers because of his disability, he remembers watching the other children play through a window in his apartment. When Charlie becomes intelligent, he often perceives that the boyhood Charlie is watching him through windows. The window represents all of the factors that keep the retarded Charlie from feeling connected to society. By gaining intelligence, Charlie crosses over to the other side of the window, where he can be accepted by members of society. But by crossing over, he is now as distant from his former self as he used to be from the children playing outside. When Charlie becomes retarded again, he maintains an indefinable sense of his former genius self, but he says, "I dont think its me because its like I see him from the window." The window is the unbridgeable divide between the two Charlies, and the only point at which the brilliant Charlie feels that he is confronting the other Charlie face-to-face is when he drunkenly sees himself in a mirror, which is itself a window to the self.

Summary

Note: Flowers for Algernon is told in the form of "progress reports" kept by Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded man who is chosen as the subject of a laboratory experiment designed to increase his intelligence.

"progris riport 1 martch 3"

In his first "progris riport," Charlie, who has an IQ of sixty-eight and is a poor speller, describes himself: he is thirty-two years old, has a job at Donner's Bakery, and takes literacy classes three times a week at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults with his teacher, Miss Kinnian. Dr. Strauss, one of the conductors of the experiment, along with Professor Nemur, has instructed Charlie to write everything he thinks and feels in these reports.

"progris riport 2—martch 4"

Charlie relates being given a "raw shok" test by a man named Burt Selden. Burt shows Charlie a stack of white cards with spilled ink on them, and he asks Charlie to tell him what he sees in the ink. Charlie, literal-minded, says that he sees spilled ink, unable to grasp the concept of imagination. He worries that he has "faled" the test.

"3d progris riport"

We learn that Strauss and Nemur have tested their intelligence-increasing procedure on animals and that they are now looking for a human subject. Miss Kinnian has recommended Charlie because of his eagerness to learn in her class. When Strauss and Nemur question Charlie about this eagerness, Charlie mentions that his mother had encouraged his education as a child. The doctors tell him that they need permission from his family to go ahead with the operation, but Charlie is not sure where they live or if they are alive. Charlie worries that staying up late to work on reports is making him tired at his bakery job, where a co-worker has recently yelled at him for dropping a tray of rolls.

"progris riport 4"

A woman gives Charlie a test in which she asks him to invent stories about people he sees in pictures that she shows him. Like with the "raw shok" test, Charlie does not understand the point of making up stories, and he tells her that, as a child, he would be hit for lying. Burt then takes Charlie to a psychology laboratory, where he shows him a mouse named Algernon who has had Strauss and Nemur's operation performed on him. Burt has Charlie compete with Algernon by solving a maze on paper while Algernon runs through an identical maze. Algernon beats Charlie every time.

"progris riport five mar 6"

Charlie says that the scientists have found his sister and gotten her permission to proceed with the operation. He listens to a conversation between Strauss and Nemur: though Nemur fears that raising Charlie's "eye-Q" precipitously will make him sick, Dr. Strauss argues that Charlie's motivation to learn is a great advantage. Nemur tries to explain to Charlie that the operation is experimental and that they cannot be certain that it will succeed in making Charlie smarter, or, perhaps, it will succeed temporarily but eventually leave Charlie worse off than he currently is. Charlie is not worried; he is thrilled to have been chosen and vows to "try awful hard" to become smarter.

"progris riport 6th Mar 8"

I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.

Charlie waits in the hospital for his operation. Miss Kinnian visits him and Charlie senses that she is concerned. He is nervous but still excited by the prospect of becoming smarter, and he looks forward to being able to beat Algernon in a maze race. He also looks forward to being as intelligent as other people so that he can make friends.

"PROGRESS REPORT 7 MARCH 11"

Three days after the operation, Charlie does not feel any different. A nurse named Hilda tells him how to spell PROGRESS REPORT, and Charlie begins diligently correcting his misspellings. Hilda also suggests to Charlie that God did not make him smart and perhaps Nemur and Strauss should not be tampering with God's will. The next day, Hilda is replaced. The new nurse says that she usually works with babies, but when Charlie asks her how babies are made, she is embarrassed and does not answer. Miss Kinnian comes to visit. When Charlie expresses disappointment that the operation has not made him smart right away, she reassures Charlie that she has faith in him.

Analysis

These first chapters introduce us to the main characters and situations of the novel, and they also introduce us to the novel's eccentric narrative form, which is composed of the diary-like progress reports of Charlie Gordon. The form of the novel gracefully mirrors the story: everything we see is filtered through Charlie's mind, and the focus of the story is the rise and fall of his mental abilities. So as the story progresses and Charlie's intelligence increases, we see gradual changes in his vocabulary, grammar, and spelling. In a sense, by reading his progress reports, we are being thrust into the roles of doctors, cued always to be alert for signs of changing mental ability.

Daniel Keyes strikes a balance in these early chapters between staying true to Charlie's rough writing style and giving us enough information to understand the situations in which Charlie finds himself, even when Charlie himself does not understand these situations. Though, for example, Charlie does not know what a "raw shok" test is, we can understand from his description of it that he means Rorschach test. Similarly, when Hilda the nurse is not working the day after she suggests that Charlie's operation has been sinful, it is easy to surmise that she has been removed by Nemur and Strauss, though this idea does not occur to Charlie.

While Charlie's cumbersome language seems altogether crude, there are enough details to learn more deeply about his temperament and his background, which suggest there is far more to Charlie than initially meets the eye. For instance, his extraordinary desire to "get smart" comes up often. And Keyes includes the detail of when Charlie hears the doctors say that his motivation to educate himself is why he has been chosen for the experiment. Charlie clearly illustrates this motivation to us with his habit of writing down words he does not know, such as "PSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY" and "THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST." Furthermore, Charlie's remarks that his mother encouraged his education as a child, but also that she would hit him for lying, begin to hint at the complex nature of Charlie's relationship with his mother. This relationship provides much of the hidden motivation for Charlie's actions, which will be explored in great depth later in the novel as Charlie recovers forgotten memories of his youth.

Nearly all of the novel's major characters are introduced in these pages, and we can start to see that Charlie's assumptions about them are often incomplete or incorrect. When Charlie writes of a bakery co-worker, "Gimpy hollers at me all the time when I do something rong, but he reely likes me because hes my frend," we are led to wonder if Gimpy is less of a "frend" than Charlie believes. Most significantly, we meet Alice Kinnian, whose mere presence in these early scenes is strong indication of her attachment to Charlie. While, Strauss and Nemur are present to observe Charlie scientifically, Miss Kinnian is always there strictly out of concern for Charlie's well being. The depth of her care for him, and its origin, remain cloudy to us at this point—as they would be incomprehensible to Charlie—but again Keyes has Charlie drop hints for us (she looks "kind of nervus and skared" when she visits him pre- operation).

Hilda, the nurse's, comment that Strauss and Nemur are overstepping their moral boundaries alludes to God's punishment of Adam for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The sin of Adam is an important metaphor for Charlie's situation in the novel—like Adam, Charlie yearns for knowledge, and like Adam, Charlie can only attain it by unnatural means without understanding the consequences. In the biblical story, after eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve lose their childlike innocence, experience a sexual awakening, and are forced to enter the world outside the garden: a blueprint for what awaits Charlie.

Summary

PROGRESS REPORT 8

Charlie anxiously awaits the effects of the operation, for he is still losing his races with Algernon. Charlie eats lunch with Burt in the college cafeteria, and overhears the students discussing art, politics, and religion. Charlie does not know what those subjects are, but he longs to understand them. He starts back to work at the bakery, where his co-workers Joe Carp, Gimpy, and Frank Reilly mostly seem to taunt him. Charlie, however, does not understand that he is the butt of their jokes. He writes that his co-workers sometimes refer to "pull[ing] a Charlie Gordon," and Gimpy uses the phrase when referring to a new employee who loses a birthday cake. Ever eager to improve himself, Charlie asks Mr. Donner if he can learn to be an apprentice baker, but Donner tells him that he should focus on his cleaning.

Dr. Strauss and Professor Nemur bring Charlie a peculiar, television- like machine that plays images and speaks to him while he sleeps to help him "get smart." Charlie is skeptical, and he complains that the machine is keeping him awake and making him tired at work. But one night it triggers a memory, which is of the time he has gone to Miss Kinnian's class for the first time, determined to learn to read. Charlie begins attending therapy sessions with Dr. Strauss, though he is uncertain of what purpose they serve. Dr. Strauss explains to Charlie about the conscious and subconscious mind, and Dr. Strauss says that the television-like device is designed to teach his subconscious while he sleeps. Dr. Strauss also gives Charlie a dictionary.

After work one day, Frank and Joe take Charlie to a bar, where they urge him to dance like a buffoon and then abandon him, but uncomprehending, Charlie laughs along with his friends. Back at the lab, Charlie finally beats Algernon in a maze race. He is beginning to remember more about his family: he recalls a time when, as a child, he said that he wanted to be a painter and his sister Norma mocked him. Miss Kinnian comes to teach Charlie at the laboratory. They begin to read Robinson Crusoe, the hardest book that Charlie has ever seen, and she works with him on his spelling.

PROGRESS REPORT 9

Charlie shocks everyone in the bakery by proving that he is capable of working the dough-mixer, and he gets promoted. He finishes Robinson Crusoe, and wants to know more about the characters, and then he becomes frustrated when Miss Kinnian tells him that there is no more. Charlie recovers another memory from his childhood and Norma's infancy. He had tried to pick her up to stop her from crying, and his mother had screamed at him never to touch the baby. Then Miss Kinnian begins to teach Charlie about grammar and punctuation. He does not immediately grasp the concepts, but one night something clicks in his mind and in his entry of April 8, he has, literally overnight, mastered punctuation. Frank and Joe take Charlie out again and make him dance with a girl, but this time Charlie suddenly realizes that they are mocking him and experiences anger and confusion. He dreams about the girl who had danced with him, and wakes up with the sheets "wet and messy."

Charlie recovers more memories: he recalls his Uncle Herman protecting him from bullies and another incident where a childhood companion nastily rewrote a Valentine's note Charlie had written to a girl at his school, resulting in the girl's brother being furious and Charlie having to move to a new school. His reading, writing, and information retention skills show sharp improvements, daily. He is given another Rorschach test, and he is angered remembering his first "raw shok" experience: Charlie insists that Burt has told him to find secret specific pictures hidden in the inkblots and not simply to imagine his own pictures. When a recording of their original session is played, Charlie is shocked to learn that he is wrong—Burt gave him identical instructions in both sessions, but Charlie has lacked the mental capacity to understand them the first time. Charlie is also stunned to hear his own childish voice in the recording. He decides that he wants to keep his progress reports private, though he does not entirely understand why he feels such a need.

Analysis

Keyes creates great suspense with the operation in Report 8, and we await Charlie's transformation as anxiously as he does. Most of the section is spent in a holding pattern, with few suggestions of increased intelligence and Charlie growing frustrated. Then, in Report 9, the suspense is relieved as Charlie's mental capacities leap to an average or above-average level. His spelling, grammar, and punctuation improve until, in the last entries of the section, his reports read like flawless prose. Similarly, his new ability to read difficult books like Robinson Crusoe demonstrates his greatly increased intellectual capacity. His first mental triumph is the relatively minor task of operating the dough-mixer at the bakery. He has seen this machine in use for seventeen years, but finally he is able to apply his observations toward a true understanding of its operations. Furthermore, he now grasps abstract concepts like the Rorschach test, and, though it may be the least of his accomplishments intellectually, Charlie's ability to beat Algernon in the maze race is a significant symbolic victory.

While Charlie's intellectual victories are all signs of physical development, we also see signs of simultaneous emotional development throughout, which often comes across as painful. When they finish Robinson Crusoe and Miss Kinnian tells Charlie that he cannot learn anything more about the characters, he is desperate to know "WHY," and the lack of a satisfying answer to this question greatly distresses him. He is similarly horrified by his sudden realization that his friends from the bakery have been tormenting him for sport, and recognizing this torment makes him suspicious of other seemingly friendly people, like Burt. His desire, at the end of Report 9, to keep his reports private demonstrates that he is beginning to question Nemur and Strauss's objectives as well. Though his intellect gives him the ability to challenge his old assumptions and develop a more mature perspective on the world, it also throws him deep into confusion.

Charlie is confused by the novelty of his new emotions and by his coming to realize how complicated and nonsensical much of the world is. His wet dream about the unkind woman with whom he dances mystifies him. Charlie begins to experience embarrassment, signifying a new awareness of what others think of him. Furthermore, this embarrassment is another reason he desires to keep his reports private, and it is linked with Charlie's first stirring of sexual desire. As we later see, events in Charlie's childhood have caused him to associate sexuality with shame, which accurately explains his embarrassment. He is incapable of dealing with his confusion, and it occasionally manifests itself as hostility, as with the Rorschach test incident.

Perhaps most important for his development as well as the development of the story, Charlie recovers multiple memories about his childhood. The story of his childhood slowly begins to be revealed, and throughout the novel these recollections will accompany and influence his development in the present. These early memories are hazy, but they demonstrate a clear pattern of Charlie's always having been under suspicion (even his mother did not trust him to hold his sister), with no one taking his side except Uncle Herman. Charlie is learning that his retardation has caused people to treat him spitefully. In a nice reversal of this phenomenon, when Charlie beats Algernon at the mazes, he immediately goes from resenting the mouse to feeling compassion for him. Charlie's instinct is to treat Algernon, now his mental inferior, as he wishes others had treated him.

Though its story is concerned foremost with human emotion and interaction and its settings are mundane, Flowers for Algernon is a science-fiction novel inasmuch as it uses speculative science and technology as the vehicle for its narrative development. It is a convention of the genre that the science need never be fully explained or convincing. Just as we are asked to suspend our disbelief about the mysterious operation Charlie undergoes, in this section we are introduced to a mysterious television-resembling machine that helps him learn. Though such a machine may seem unrealistic, Keyes wants the emotional impact of Charlie's story to outweigh any doubts we might have about the novel's fuzzy science.

Summary

PROGRESS REPORT 10

Charlie reconfigures the machines at the bakery to increase productivity and receives another raise. He remembers a time—referring to himself in the third person not as "I" but as "Charlie"—when Gimpy had tried to teach him to make rolls, but Charlie could not retain the information. Gimpy had been kind. Charlie notices that, with his intelligence increased, the people around him are not proud but, instead, uncomfortable and upset. He decides to ask Miss Kinnian to a movie to celebrate his raise, though he is unsure if such an invitation is appropriate. Strauss and Nemur agree to let Charlie keep some reports private, and he becomes more comfortable writing about personal matters.

Charlie overhears Nemur and Strauss arguing about whether to present their preliminary findings at an upcoming convention in Chicago. Strauss thinks it is premature, but as the senior member of the research team, Nemur overrides his objections. Hearing the pettiness of their argument, Charlie realizes that despite their intelligence, they are flawed and fallible men. Charlie befriends some of the college students he meets on campus, and he joyfully discusses Shakespeare with them. They also discuss God, and Charlie for the first time comprehends the overwhelming enormity of the topic. He later has a memory flashback of his mother crying out "He's normal! He's normal!" when he was six years old and his father's attempts to force her to accept his retardation. Charlie remembers his mother hysterically slapping him for excreting in his pants. He recalls his parents' names, Matt and Rose.

PROGRESS REPORT 11

Charlie takes Miss Kinnian, whom he now calls "Alice," to the movies and realizes his attraction to her. Their physical proximity flummoxes Charlie. He confesses his attraction over dinner, and she tells him that it would be inappropriate, for the sake of the experiment, for them to develop a romance. Charlie is upset that the books he reads do not offer solutions to the emotional turmoil he is experiencing. He has a memory of discovering Norma's underpants in the laundry hamper, crusted with menstrual blood.

Charlie is distraught to discover that Gimpy has been stealing from the bakery, undercharging customers in exchange for kickbacks. Charlie agonizes over whether to tell Mr. Donner, and he asks both Nemur and Strauss for advice. Strauss insists that he has a moral obligation to tell, but Nemur argues that he should not become involved. Nemur's suggestion that Charlie has been practically an "inanimate object" before the operation, and thus not accountable, angers Charlie. Charlie feels that Nemur does not understand that he has been a person even when retarded. Charlie asks Alice about his dilemma, and she tells him that he must feel his own decision from within.

Charlie suddenly understands that he is capable of making moral judgments. He decides to confront Gimpy and give him the opportunity to mend his ways before Charlie tells Donner. Trapped, Gimpy grudgingly agrees, clearly disconcerted by Charlie's inexplicable intelligence. Thinking about Alice's role in his newfound independence, Charlie decides that he is in love with her. Meanwhile, Charlie's intellectual pursuits advance far beyond average level, and he now finds the college professors to be too limited and shortsighted to interest him.

Charlie takes Alice to a concert in Central Park. Shortly after putting his arm around her, he sees a teenage boy watching them, his pants undone. Charlie chases after the boy but cannot find him, and later, he decides that the boy was a hallucination brought about by the confusion resulting from his intellectual growth outstripping his emotional growth. Charlie has a genius's IQ, but he is emotionally adolescent.

Pressured by his other employees, Donner fires Charlie from the bakery. Charlie is surprised to realize how attached he is to his job there. A kindly co-worker, Fanny, is sorry for him, but she also fears his sudden change and explains to him the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge. Charlie goes to Alice's apartment. They approach intimacy, but Charlie panics when he thinks about kissing her. He has a flashback memory of his mother beating him brutally for having an erection. Alice kisses Charlie, but he seizes with terror and cries himself to sleep.

Analysis

In this section, Charlie's intellectual growth continues unabated, until he surpasses nearly all those around him and begins to view them more critically. Whereas on April 1, in Progress Report 8, he surprises his co-workers by demonstrating mere competence on the dough-mixer, on April 21 he is redesigning the dough-mixing process. His intelligence is not merely mechanical, and he makes a tremendous psychological leap when he realizes that he is capable of solving his own moral dilemma with Gimpy at the bakery. Now on a level mental playing field with everyone around him, he learns that they are not the titanic, impressive figures he has thought before the operation. In the same way that they are not impressed with his new intellect, he is disappointed by their limitations, insecurities, and shortcomings.

Charlie comes to realize that the scientists, especially Professor Nemur, think of him more like a laboratory specimen than a person. Nemur tells Charlie that he was an "inanimate object" before the operation, implying that Nemur alone has granted Charlie his humanity. Charlie deeply resents the notion that he has not been a real person before the operation, but even he does not feel entirely connected to his past. In fact, when he thinks back on his past—which he does constantly in these sections, deluged by a flood of memories—he sees himself from outside, as "Charlie" rather than "I." Though Charlie is now viewing his former self almost as if he is another doctor, he is still surprised by Nemur's clinical lack of compassion.

Earlier, Charlie comes to understand the ostracizing in his life as a retarded man, but now he sees how people are shunning him in similar ways for his superior intelligence. People who knew him previously are unnerved by the change. Charlie recovers a memory of Gimpy being kind to him in the past, but Gimpy is now among the workers who get Charlie fired. Gimpy regrets having been nice to Charlie, and he even feels he has wasted his compassion on someone who does not need or deserve it. Mr. Donner no longer feels the need to protect or shelter Charlie. Even Fanny, the only bakery worker who has consistently been kind to Charlie, now fears that his intellectual leap cannot be a pure blessing, and she wonders aloud if he has made a deal with the Devil.

Charlie's intelligence also bothers people who have never known him before, such as the professors who shy away from intellectual discourse when they realize that Charlie has a greater depth of knowledge than they. In the beginning of the novel, Charlie has written of a desire to "get smart" in order to make "frends," since he has longed for normalcy. But now the experiment has taken his mental abilities too far. His genius is as much of a social curse as his retardation has been. Indeed, in this section he seems torn between two unpleasant worlds, growing spiteful of the dull college students he meets but still terribly saddened to lose his job at the bakery, a job that no longer has anything to offer him but familiarity.

As he grows closer to Alice, whom he no longer calls "Miss Kinnian" in another mark of his growing independence, many of the memories he recovers relate to sexuality and shame. He remembers intense trauma upon discovering Norma's bloody underpants in the laundry, associating menstruation with violence and shame. He remembers his mother beating him brutally when she found him with an erection; Rose, tormented by Charlie's abnormality, sought to deny him his sexual desires, as if to assert that sexuality's inherent shamefulness could only be absolved by a normal social existence. Thus, according to Rose, since Charlie could never have a fully "normal" social existence, she irrationally tried to beat his sexuality out of him. Charlie's struggle to break through the panic Rose has instilled in him regarding sexuality eventually becomes equivalent to Charlie's struggle to overcome the difficulties of his past and live like a mature adult.

Summary

I'll stop studying, and I'll be a dummy just like him. I'll forget everything I learned and then I'll be just like him.

Charlie writes that his relationship with Nemur is increasingly strained, because Nemur continues to treat him more as a laboratory specimen than a human being. Nemur is upset that Charlie has fallen behind on keeping his progress reports, and Charlie argues that writing is too slow and time-consuming a process and that, between learning about the outside world and his constant self-analysis, he does not have time to write it all down. Strauss suggests that Charlie learn to type, which he does.

Charlie has nightmares for three nights after his panic in Alice's apartment. He has a recurring image of looking at the bakery window and seeing his former retarded self on the other side, watching him. He remembers a childhood incident wherein Norma had gotten an A on a school test and asked for a dog that their mother had promised if Norma did well in school. Charlie had offered to help take care of a dog, if their parents bought one for her, and Norma had demanded the dog be just her own. Their father had declared that if Norma were selfish about it, there would be no dog, despite Rose's promise. Norma had petulantly threatened to "forget" everything she knew and be a "dummy" like Charlie if her good work would not be rewarded. Angrily, Charlie wishes now that he could tell Norma that he never intended to hurt or annoy her, he only wanted her to like him and play with him.

Charlie goes to visit Alice where she teaches at the Center for Retarded Adults. He sees many of the mentally disabled people with whom he had once attended the school. Alice is upset with him for coming into the classroom, and she tells him that he is no longer the warm, open person she once knew; now he seems cold and aggressive. Charlie insists that he has merely learned to defend himself. Alice replies that she now feels insecure with him because of his clear intellectual superiority. He drops her off at her apartment, feeling sad and very distant from her. His love, he thinks, has cooled into fondness; as his intelligence has skyrocketed, his affection for Alice has, inversely, decreased.

Charlie begins wandering through the streets of New York at night. One night, he meets a strange and sad woman in Central Park who, after telling him about her problems, offers to have sex with him. He almost goes home with her until she reveals that she is pregnant. Charlie flashes on an image of his mother pregnant with his sister, and he associates that time with his mother beginning to give up on him and place her hopes in Norma. Cursing the woman in the park, Charlie grabs her shoulder, but she screams, and a group of people runs toward them. Charlie runs away, and he hears her telling the group that he tried to attack her. Part of Charlie longs to be caught and beaten. He wants to be punished, though he cannot say why or for what.

Analysis

Charlie's intellectual journey continues in this section, but now the outward manifestations of his genius are only hinted at, and Charlie's inward journey becomes his own focus, and thus, the focus of the novel. Alice seems to support this trend, such as when she tells him she does not understand his talk about "cultural variants, and neo-Boulean mathematics, and post-symbolic logic." He now studies his own emotions much as he has studied grammar, Shakespeare, economics, and other academic pursuits. As he walks home from his upsetting encounter with Alice, he seems to be analyzing his emotions even as he is going through them.

Charlie believes that his love for Alice is inversely related to his level of mental ability, and this conflict between intellect and emotion is also suggested by the different portrayals of Nemur and Alice in this section. An obsessive, career-driven academic determined to make a name for himself as a great scientist, Nemur represents one extreme perspective with regard to the importance of intelligence in human life: the idea that intelligence is everything, that nothing else matters, such that a mental impairment threatens classification as a human being. Alice, a compassionate and generous teacher of retarded adults, represents the opposite perspective: the idea that human qualities such as kindness and feeling are more important than intelligence. Charlie gets frustrated with both Nemur and Alice in this section, Nemur for his arrogant dismissal of Charlie's former life, and Alice for her disinterest in his new mental powers. Throughout the rest of the novel, Charlie struggles to find a balance between these two perspectives, a way to combine his superhuman intelligence with human feeling but without betraying either.

The idea that intelligence is not the most important human trait is put forth in an interesting, though completely sarcastic, fashion by Norma in Charlie's childhood memory. When Norma is refused her dog because of her refusal to share it with Charlie, she concludes that Charlie is getting preferential treatment because of his disability. She threatens to lose all of her intelligence, which is a feat just as impossible as it should be for Charlie to gain intelligence, so that she will receive treatment equal to Charlie's. This is a curious reversal of the pattern we see in the novel of people treating Charlie patronizingly, and in this one sarcastic moment, Norma does not feel superior to Charlie but is envious of him. Keyes reinforces the notion that superior intelligence does not necessarily lead to superior capacity for happiness, and Norma's impossible threat to grow dumber, which terrifies Rose, foreshadows what will happen to Charlie at the end of the novel.

Charlie's struggle is complicated by his burgeoning sexual desire, which is in direct conflict with his ingrained sense of shame and self-loathing with regard to sex. And though Charlie is coming to understand why he feels so confused about sex, he still cannot control his turmoil. When the woman in the park offers to make love to Charlie, he is initially prepared to take her up on her offer, and when he kisses her, he does not experience the extreme paralyzing hallucinations that he does in such situations with Alice. The implication is that by removing the emotional aspects of intimacy, Charlie may be approaching sex more clinically and learning more about the act and himself in the process. But Charlie's hope of uncomplicated sex is shattered by the woman's revelation that she is pregnant, and Charlie's resultant flashback image of his pregnant mother brings all of the searing shame and panic that he has hoped to avoid. The shame he feels now, for its suddenness, is even more acute than the shame he has felt with Alice. When he hopes to be caught and beaten by the crowd that thinks he has tried to rape the woman, he is linking desire with punishment, just as his mother has taught him. His intellect has been catapulted to dizzying heights, but nothing can be done to make his emotional development keep pace.

Summary

Step right this way and see the side show! An act never before seen in the scientific world! A mouse and a moron turned into geniuses before your very eyes!

Charlie begins dictating his progress reports to a tape recorder. The first part of this report is recorded on a flight to Chicago where Nemur and Strauss will reveal their preliminary findings to the researchers' convention. Charlie and Algernon will be the star exhibits of their presentation. As the plane takes off, Charlie is uncomfortable putting his seat belt on because he dislikes the feeling of confinement. Trying to remember why, he flashes back to a time in childhood when his mother took him to a quack doctor named Guarino, who promised to increase his intelligence and make him normal. This was before Norma was born and Rose's energies were all still focused on making Charlie normal. Though Charlie's father had been skeptical, Rose had insisted that Charlie go through with Guarino's regimen, which included being strapped onto a table. This claustrophobic process had instilled in Charlie a fear of confinement. Charlie says that, though Guarino was a crook and his process a sham, he bears him no ill will—Guarino was always kind to him and never made him feel inferior for his retardation. Charlie also remembers his father harboring bitterness about the expensive sessions, which forced him to go on working as a barbershop supply salesman rather than opening his own barbershop, as he dreamed of doing for most of Charlie's childhood. By the time the plane lands, Charlie is no longer uncomfortable in his seatbelt.

At the hotel before the conference, Charlie meets many curious scientists and students who have heard about him. They engage him on a wide variety of topics, and with his vast range of knowledge, he easily discusses everything from contemporary economic theory to obscure linguistics and mathematics. When he hears Nemur discussing the experiment with a student, Charlie asks Nemur about an article recently published in the Hindu Journal of Psychopathology on related scientific matters. Charlie is shocked to learn that Nemur could not have read the article, because he does not speak Hindi. Charlie is further stunned to learn that Strauss does not speak Hindi either—Strauss claims to speak six different languages but that number is unimpressive to Charlie, who has learned more languages in the past two months. Charlie realizes that he now understands more about the experiment than Nemur and Strauss, and he storms away, angrily declaring that they are frauds. Burt catches him and urges him to be more tolerant of others' shortcomings, since Nemur and Strauss after all, never claimed to be all-knowing. Charlie realizes that he has been impatient, and that his quest to take in all of the world's knowledge is an impossible one.

Charlie sits on the stage at the conference during Nemur and Strauss's presentation. He learns from listening to Burt deliver his paper regarding Algernon that, at the height of his intelligence, Algernon's behavior had grown erratic and self-destructive. Charlie is annoyed that this information has been withheld from him. Charlie also grows increasingly frustrated at hearing the scientists suggest that he has been subhuman prior to their operation, and as a result he feels debased, like a carnival side show act. He privately toys with the idea of creating havoc in the convention by letting Algernon out of his cage. During Nemur's remarks, Charlie suddenly realizes that there is a scientific flaw in the experiment: Nemur has miscalculated the amount of observation time necessary to determine whether or not the intelligence increase in Algernon will be permanent. Charlie realizes that he may yet lose his intelligence. Angry with Nemur now both for his patronizing attitude and for his lack of scientific thoroughness, Charlie succumbs to his urge to free Algernon from his cage. As the mouse scampers away, the auditorium descends into chaos. Charlie is able to catch Algernon, and he runs away from the conference with the mouse in his pocket. He takes a flight back to New York where he plans to find an apartment and hide out from Strauss and Nemur for a while. A new sense of urgency is upon Charlie with the knowledge that his intelligence may desert him.

Analysis

This section, in which Charlie learns that his intelligence may soon falter and then runs away from the convention to hide out on his own, is the climactic point of the novel's first half. Charlie's struggle to this point has largely been to establish and trust his own independence after having been conditioned his entire life to believe that he is inferior. Thus, Charlie is not immediately able to accept fully that his intelligence qualifies him to make his own decisions. Even when Charlie has been angered by the shortcomings of those around him, he has been reluctant to break from the structured environment of the lab. Some part of Charlie has continued to believe that he needs to be directed and controlled, as his mother sought to control him. By abandoning the scientists at the convention, Charlie finally cuts ties from any outside authority.

Charlie's willingness to trust himself results, in part, from his discovery that his mental abilities have come further than he had imagined. In the beginning of the book, when retarded, Charlie associates becoming smart with becoming normal. But Charlie's development has been so rapid that he has not had time or the perspective to gauge what normalcy really is. Though he has had indications in previous sections that his intelligence has leapfrogged well above average—for example, his growing impatience with the Beekman professors he meets, and Alice's telling him that she cannot keep up with his academic interests—it still comes as a nerve-wracking revelation to him that he is now smarter than Nemur and Strauss. When Charlie discovers that Nemur cannot speak Hindi, his first reaction is to label Nemur a fraud. But Nemur has certainly never represented that he does speak Hindi, and what Charlie actually perceives as fraudulent is the notion that Nemur is superior to Charlie, a notion that Charlie can now trust himself to deny.

As Charlie comes to grips with the fact that his intellect and knowledge are greater than that of the people who are studying him, he readjusts his criteria for judging them personally. Since Charlie is now the intellectual equal of any scientist he meets, none of them seem godlike or impressive any longer, and now he judges them by their capacity for compassion. The flashbacks Charlie has to the treatments by the quack Dr. Guarino (who had falsely promised to do exactly what Nemur actually has done, increase Charlie's intelligence) serve to illustrate Charlie's new value system. In effect, Charlie thinks well of Guarino, who was a crook and an impostor as a scientist, but who was always kind to Charlie. Guarino stands in stark contrast to Nemur, who is accomplished and perhaps brilliant in his field, but is arrogant and dismissive of Charlie.

Charlie's feeling of identification with Algernon becomes more acute in this segment. Though Charlie initially felt like he was in competition with the mouse, ever since he surpassed him at maze-solving ability, Charlie has felt protective of the mouse. Feeling objectified on the convention stage, Charlie feels strong sympathy for Algernon locked in his cage. Charlie resents that the mouse has to solve puzzles for his food just as he resents the way that he himself is trotted out for the entertainment of the callous scientists. He finds himself unable to resist letting Algernon out of his cage, and in this same moment, he symbolically decides to free himself from Nemur and Strauss's observation.

Keyes ends the segment by setting up great suspense for the rest of the novel. When Charlie realizes that Nemur's hypothesis is flawed and that he and Algernon may both yet lose their intelligence, we are again put in the position of doctors reading Charlie's progress reports. But unlike the beginning, where we were cued to look for signs of increased intelligence, now Keyes puts us on alert for signs of decreased mental ability. We—and Charlie—will now also be watching Algernon carefully, for it is implied that whatever happens to Algernon will happen to Charlie soon after.

Summary

PROGRESS REPORT 14

I wasn't his son. That was another Charlie. Intelligence and knowledge had changed me, and he would resent me….

Charlie sees a newspaper interview with Norma in which she insists she does not know Charlie's whereabouts, since Rose had told Norma that Charlie had been sent off to the Warren Home, an institution for the mentally handicapped, and had died there years ago. The article also mentions that Matt now owns his own barbershop and no longer lives with Rose. Charlie remembers that after Norma was born, Rose had stopped longing for him to become normal and simply had begun wanting him to disappear.

Charlie moves into a city apartment, and builds Algernon an elaborate maze in which to solve puzzles. He meets his hall neighbor Fay Lillman, a free spirited and flirtatious artist. When Fay sees Charlie's apartment, she is appalled by its neatness. She says that she cannot stand straight lines and that she drinks to make the lines go blurry. Charlie finds her strange but undeniably attractive.

Charlie goes to visit his father at his shop. Matt does not recognize his son, and treats Charlie as a customer. Too nervous to say anything, Charlie goes through with getting a haircut, and he remembers the night that his father took him to live with his Uncle Herman after Rose had hysterically threatened that if he was not taken off to live at the Warren Home immediately, she would kill him with a carving knife. Charlie attempts to reveal his identity to Matt, but after an awkward and inconclusive exchange, he gives up and leaves the shop.

Algernon performs well in Charlie's new mazes, but the mouse sometimes seems to be angry or depressed, throwing himself against the walls in a frenzy. Fay buys Algernon a female companion mouse, Minnie. One night, Fay stays in Charlie's apartment and they drink together. Charlie passes out. The next morning, naked in bed together, though Fay says that they have not made love all the while wondering if Charlie is gay, Fay tells him that he acted like a retarded man while he was drunk. Charlie realizes that the old, retarded Charlie has never left him and that his former self still exists within his mind.

Charlie spends a day in movie theaters and wandering the streets, just to be among other people. He eats at the diner where he had taken Alice after their movie date. A mentally disabled busboy accidentally breaks some dishes, and as he sweeps up the customers taunt him while the man smiles uncomprehendingly along with their insults. Infuriated, Charlie screams to the crowd that the man is human and deserves respect. Charlie visits Alice, and, with her, he talks his feelings through. He worries that he has become emotionally detached from everyone around him, and he yearns to reconnect with humanity.

He wonders if the inner retarded Charlie would allow him to make love to Alice if he were to pretend that she were Fay. He hypothesizes that, because he cares for Fay less deeply than he does for Alice, his inner self might not panic at the notion of sex with Fay. He turns out the lights and begins kissing Alice, but he is unable to trick himself into believing that she is Fay and feels guilty for trying to use Alice in an emotional experiment. Charlie goes home and waits for Fay to return from dancing. When she arrives he is sexually aggressive. They make love, and he senses the "other" Charlie watching them but not panicking. Charlie and Fay begin an affair and soon enough he loses the sense of the other Charlie's surveillance. Charlie decides to go back to the lab and take over research on the experiment. One day Algernon attacks Minnie and bites Fay. Charlie is concerned by Algernon's hostility.

PROGRESS REPORT 15

The Welberg Foundation, which is paying for the experiment, agrees to allow Charlie to work at Beekman without having to report to Nemur. Charlie returns to the lab, and Burt begins working with Algernon again, disturbed to discover that Algernon's problem-solving abilities seem to have regressed. Charlie asks Nemur what contingency plans have been made for him if his own intelligence should not hold. Nemur tells him that should he become retarded again, he will be sent to the Warren Home. Charlie decides that he needs to visit Warren to see what may await him.

Analysis

Charlie's anticlimactic visit with his father leads him to crystallize a notion that has been implicit in his dreams and hallucinations, which is that there are two Charlie Gordons, the old retarded version, and the current genius. These two Charlies cohabit the same body, but they are nonetheless divided. Though Matt has never been strong enough to fully defend Charlie against Rose's tyranny, he has always supported his son, and for that reason Charlie feels warmly toward his father. Charlie may be unable to bring himself to reveal his identity to Matt because he knows that he is no longer the Charlie Gordon that Matt knew. Just as the bakery workers are not proud of Charlie's new intellect, Charlie fears that Matt will have no reason to feel anything but threatened by his genius son.

Charlie's relationship with Fay represents a step forward in his personal and emotional development. Fay is the first significant character in the novel who does not know that Charlie used to be retarded, because the genius Charlie is the only Charlie she knows. Though Charlie has mentioned brief interactions with professors at Beekman who did not know about his past, Fay is the first new person that he allows himself to have a personal relationship with. She is unlike anyone else in his world, and when she talks about her loathing of straight lines, it is almost as if to say that she is entirely uninterested in the world of science and intellectual pursuits. Fay's eccentric way of being is purely emotional, and thus she is an appropriate teacher for the emotionally crippled Charlie.

Though Charlie realizes in this section that emotional troubles cannot be solved in the same manner as intellectual puzzles, he nonetheless maintains a scientific approach to his problems. He observes his own behavior in different sexually tense situations to try to determine what factors are influencing his confusion. Much as Burt might conduct an experiment by building different sorts of mazes for Algernon, Charlie constructs different sexually- charged situations to see how the other Charlie will react. While the other Charlie objects violently to the prospect of intimacy with Alice, Charlie discovers that his alter ego is merely curious about intimacy with Fay. This, perhaps, is partially because the old Charlie does not know Fay and also surely because Charlie has residual feelings of overwhelming love for Alice, while he is not nearly so attached to Fay. When Charlie tries to make love to Alice while pretending she is Fay, he is constructing an experiment to see if the other Charlie can be tricked into calmness, but he is unable to go through with his plan because he realizes that he would be treating Alice as an inhuman factor in his experiment in the way that Nemur has callously treated him.

Keyes strengthens the parallel between Charlie and Algernon by introducing Minnie, a female companion for Algernon, at the same time as Charlie begins his affair with Fay. But Algernon's increasingly erratic behavior, throwing himself furiously against the walls of his maze, is a frightening omen of what lies ahead for Charlie, and Algernon's attacking Minnie creates suspense by leading us to wonder if Charlie will soon lash out at Fay or, even, at Alice. When Charlie returns to the lab and learns that Algernon's intelligence already has already begun to desert him, we know that Charlie's decline cannot be far off. The slower Charlie, the Charlie from the beginning of the novel, is waiting in the wings to reassert himself.

Summary

Charlie visits the Warren Home. The staff makes a good impression on Charlie, but their descriptions of the students' conditions along with the students' dim faces, upset Charlie. He imagines that he will soon be among them. Charlie is particularly distressed by an encounter with a friendly deaf-mute boy, and in a moment where the boy seems to seek his approval, Charlie has trouble mustering kindness.

One night Alice visits Charlie's apartment and Fay unexpectedly shows up. To Charlie's surprise, the women get along favorably and the three of them stay up talking and drinking. Alice tells Charlie that she understands why Charlie is enamored of Fay's lightheartedness and spontaneity, but Alice worries that Fay, and the drinking habits Charlie has picked up from her, are detrimental to Charlie's important work. Charlie goes home and makes love to Fay, thinking all along about Alice. Charlie throws himself into his work, often sleeping at the lab. Fay moves on to another boyfriend, but Charlie cannot be distracted—he is exhilarated by the intensity of his own concentration. Algernon's condition continues to worsen, and Charlie knows that if he can figure out why, he will give the world knowledge that could be invaluable to future research.

Charlie attends a party in honor of the Welberg Foundation. Charlie overhears Strauss explaining to a foundation board member that even failed experiments are scientifically valuable, for they are often as educational as successes. Somewhat drunk, Charlie starts to interject a rude comment, but Strauss cuts him off. Charlie continues to alienate the guests, and when the party is over, Nemur accuses Charlie of being ungrateful for all that the operation has given him. Charlie argues that he has little for which to be grateful, since he feels that the greatest lesson he has learned with his intelligence is that no one cares about him, whether he is a moron or a genius. Nemur accuses Charlie of becoming cynical and self-centered. In his drunken and emotional state, Charlie senses himself starting to act like the retarded Charlie. He hurries to the bathroom and looks in the mirror, and he feels that he is looking directly at the other Charlie. He tells the other Charlie that they are enemies and that he will fight to keep the retarded Charlie from regaining control of his body. He goes home miserable, deciding that Nemur's accusations have been correct.

Charlie has a massive mental breakthrough. He writes a paper on his findings. In a letter to Nemur, he explains that he has uncovered a phenomenon he deems the "Algernon-Gordon Effect," of which the essential meaning is that "ARTIFICIALLY- INDUCED INTELLIGENCE DETERIORATES AT A LENGTH OF TIME DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE QUANTITY OF THE INCREASE." Therefore, the more intelligence Charlie has gained, the quicker he will lose it. Charlie tries to reassure a distraught Alice, as well as Nemur and Strauss, that they could not have foreseen this effect, and that they should not feel guilty. Charlie senses himself becoming absent minded, implying the onset of his decline. Algernon dies, and Charlie buries him the backyard, putting flowers on the grave.

Charlie goes to see his mother. She panics, and Charlie, trying to win her trust, starts frantically telling her as much as he can about what has happened to him. Soon he realizes that she is delusional and though at one moment she seems to understand that Charlie is her son, the next she asks him if he is a bill collector. Charlie patiently tries to explain his recent progress: he tells her that he has fulfilled her dreams and become a success. As proof, he shows her the paper he has written. She is proud and feels vindicated. Norma, now an adult caring for Rose, arrives home. To Charlie's surprise, she is delighted to see him. They have a long talk, and Norma apologizes for having been cruel to Charlie in childhood. Suddenly Rose comes at Charlie with a knife, telling him to keep away from Norma with his sexual thoughts. Charlie leaves, weeping. As he walks away, he looks back at the house and sees the face of his boyhood self peering through the window.

Analysis

As the time pressure increases on Charlie to accomplish his goals before his intellect deserts him, he becomes intensely focused on two goals: first, to untangle the scientific mystery of why he will intellectually regress, and second, to reach an emotional maturity. Though intellect and emotion have often seemed to be in conflict throughout the novel, Charlie's two quests are intertwined in this section. Though his immersion in Fay's lifestyle of dance and drink and sex has been significant to Charlie's development, when Alice recommends to Charlie that his work is too important to be compromised by distractions, Charlie immediately forsakes Fay for the laboratory. Despite his assertion in Progress Report 12 that his love for Alice has dissipated, she remains the person with whom he has the strongest emotional bond, and it is only her encouragement that allows Charlie to realize that his relationship with Fay is not the whole of his emotional being and that he can focus on his work without giving up his emotional quest. Intellectual work becomes emotional for Charlie—his scientific breakthroughs fill him with joy in a way that they could not have previously.

Charlie has felt bitterness toward Nemur for most of the novel, but for the first time, in their argument after the cocktail party, Nemur is able to rebut Charlie's accusations. In fact, the points Nemur makes are strong enough to alter Charlie's perception altogether. Nemur reminds Charlie that he was a completely different person before the operation—not just retarded, but also kindhearted and warm—and that Nemur may take credit for making Charlie intelligent, but he takes no credit at all for creating the new cold and unpleasant Charlie. The new cold Charlie, Nemur suggests, is Charlie's own creation. Though Charlie's complaint against Nemur—that he is appallingly arrogant and inconsiderate—remains essentially valid, Charlie is forced to realize that he has come to embody these qualities himself and that, despite his extraordinary circumstances, Charlie has no better excuse than Nemur does. This is Charlie's greatest leap toward emotional maturity, and although he still carries a frightened little boy within, after the argument with Nemur he comes to take full responsibility for his own life.

It is this sense of independence that gives Charlie the strength to see his mother and sister, an experience that completes his journey to come to terms with his past. Though Charlie earlier has been unable to tell his father who he is, here he insists on trying to make his mother understand who he is and what has happened to him, despite the difficulty of getting through to her. Even when it becomes clear to Charlie that his mother has succumbed to dementia, he patiently retells his story until she understands, because it is crucial for him to know that he has done his best to reconnect with her on some level. In her delusional state, all Charlie can do is try to make her happy by, essentially, acting out the irrational fantasy she has harbored since his youth, which is his development into normalcy and success. Charlie's reunion with Norma is far more satisfying emotionally, and in their conversation, Charlie finally is allowed to see some of her perspective on their youth together, and he is able to empathize with her. Though the wounds of Charlie's childhood can never be fully healed, by coming to understand his mother and sister better—not through his own memories, but by talking to them directly—Charlie is able to forgive. With time running out fast before the intelligence dips, the new Charlie unshackles himself from the emotional burden of his past.

Summary

Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.

Charlie thinks about suicide, but he decides that he must keep writing his reports for the sake of science. At a therapy session with Strauss, he has a hallucination in which he seems to fly into the center of his own unconscious, represented by a red, pulsing flower, and he imagines himself being battered against the walls of a cave. At the lab, Burt tests Charlie on his ability to solve mazes, and Charlie has difficulty and gets frustrated. Charlie then finds himself flummoxed by the Rorschach test. He tells Burt that he will no longer come to the lab. Strauss tries to visit Charlie at his apartment, but Charlie refuses to let him in. Charlie picks up Paradise Lost, by John Milton, but though he knows he loved the book only a few weeks before, he is now unable to understand it. He flashes back to a time when his mother, frustratedly trying to teach him to read, had insisted to his father that he was not retarded, but merely lazy. Charlie tears the copy of Paradise Lost apart.

Alice comes to stay with Charlie. She says she wants to spend as much time as possible with him before the effects of the operation recede completely. She holds him, and for once he does not feel the old inner panic. They make love for the first time, and it is a transcendent, spiritual experience, unlike the purely physical sex Charlie had had with Fay. Despite their happiness, Charlie cannot bear the thought of Alice witnessing his descent, and he makes her promise to leave permanently when he asks her.

Charlie picks up his paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and is unable to understand it. He forgets the languages he has taught himself. His motor control begins to deteriorate. He finds himself watching television all day. Alice tries to be helpful by tidying up the apartment, but Charlie gets angry, because he wants everything left as it is, "to remind me of what I'm leaving behind." Charlie also gets upset at Alice for trying to encourage him to pursue intellectual activities in which he is no longer interested, and her denial of his condition reminds him of his mother. Charlie asks Alice to leave and, devastated, she does.

Charlie wonders if he can stall his deterioration. He knows that he cannot keep himself from forgetting things, but he wonders if he can learn and retain new things, thus maintaining a steady level of intelligence. But in his entry of November 1, Charlie's punctuation is flawed, and soon he loses accuracy in his grammar and spelling as well. He describes voyeuristically watching a woman bathing in the apartment across the courtyard from his. Alice comes to see him but Charlie refuses to let her in.

Now retarded again, and refusing to accept money from Alice and Strauss, Charlie goes back to the bakery and gets his old job back. When a new employee named Klaus picks on Charlie, threatening to break his arm, Joe, Frank, and Gimpy come to Charlie's rescue. They tell him that he should come to them for help if anyone ever gives him trouble. Charlie is grateful for his friends.

Charlie forgets that he is no longer enrolled in Miss Kinnian's class at the Center for Retarded Adults and shows up there. When she sees him reverted entirely to his original state, she runs from the room weeping. Charlie senses that people feel sorry for him, and he decides to go live at the Warren Home. In his final note, he says that he is glad he got to be smart for a short time and that he got to learn about his family. He has a vague memory of himself as a genius: "he looks different and he walks different but I dont think its me because its like I see him from the window." He writes goodbye to Miss Kinnian and Dr. Strauss. He recommends to Professor Nemur that he will have more friends if he does not get so upset when people laugh at him. Finally, he leaves a postscript requesting "please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard."

Analysis

Just as Keyes creates suspense when we wait for Charlie to gain ability, here we anxiously watch for signs of Charlie's regression. The suspense, however, is increased by Charlie's fight to maintain his intelligence. When Charlie decides that perhaps he can forestall his descent by giving his brain new information to replace the knowledge he is losing, we wonder if this might work, and the concept itself is no more outlandish than any of the other vague science fiction in the novel. For a moment, then, it seems that Charlie might be able to retain average intelligence. Keyes dashes this hope almost immediately, when the next entry shows Charlie's worst mental slippage yet, reflected in his inability to use punctuation properly. We are soon reading the prose of the book's original narrator, the other Charlie. The total dissimilarity of their writing styles reinforces the notion that there are two Charlies and that the Charlie we first meet has returned to stay. But this old, slower Charlie retains a piece of the genius Charlie in his memory though, seeing him through the metaphorical window that the genius Charlie had often imagined seeing the retarded Charlie.

The genius Charlie exits the novel on a bittersweet note, and his affair with Alice, in his last days of heightened intellect, is the peak of his emotional development. Having overcome his association of sex with shame, he is finally able to see Alice as an emotional equal. No longer afraid of her womanhood or his sexual impulses, and no longer feeling the gaze of the other Charlie, he is able to consummate the romance that has always existed between them. When Charlie says that the love he and Alice experience is "more than most people find in a lifetime," we know that he has accomplished his loftiest goal: emotional fulfillment.

Mentally slow again, Charlie's journey can be seen as a full circle, with nothing gained, but actually Charlie has grown emotionally in the novel, and this growth will stay with him forever. He has Nemur and Strauss to thank for his brief term as a genius, but his emotional quest has been purely his own. When Charlie writes at the end that he is glad to have learned about his family and that "I was a person just like evryone," we see that, though his detailed memories of childhood might leave him, his sense of understanding and forgiveness toward his family have stuck. And though he has been warmhearted at the beginning of the novel, his return to this state is not just regression. He has traveled through bitterness and isolation, and his warmth now resonates from meaningful experience. Charlie will not be the same; like Adam and Eve—the subjects of Paradise Lost, a book that the genius Charlie has loved—Charlie has seen and learned too much to return unchanged to his original state. Though Charlie has feared and hated the Warren Home throughout the novel, he believes that he will be content there at the end.

Charlie has always approached his reports as purposeful for educational or research reasons, and so he uses a postscript to Nemur to teach a lesson. In the previous report, Nemur accuses Charlie of becoming cold as he has become brilliant, and Charlie realizes that Nemur is right. Now, Charlie attempts to return the favor by teaching Nemur the same lesson that Nemur has taught him, which is that if he opens his heart he will "have more frends." Keyes leaves a glimmer of hope that, not only will Charlie's reports be valuable for science's sake, but perhaps Nemur and others will be able to glean emotional wisdom from them.

Charlie's final postscript is also telling. Algernon, like any laboratory animal, has been chosen not for personal qualities but to represent the behavior of all mice, so as to determine the effects of the experiment. But by asking the researchers to put fresh flowers on Algernon's grave, Charlie asks them to respect the mouse's memory as he respects it, which is a marker of how he now respects his own self-worth.

1. And he said that meens Im doing something grate for sience and Ill be famus and my name will go down in the books. I dont care so much about beeing famus. I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me. [Explanation]

2. "And I hate school! I hate it! I'll stop studying, and I'll be a dummy like him. I'll forget everything I learned and then I'll be just like him." She runs out of the room, shrieking: "It's happening to me already. I'm forgetting everything … I'm forgetting … I don't remember anything I learned any more!" [Explanation]

3. We were the main attraction of the evening, and when we settled, the chairman began his introduction. I half expected to hear him boom out: Laideezzz and gentulmennnnnn. Step right this way and see the side show! An act never before seen in the scientific world! A mouse and a moron turned into geniuses before your very eyes! [Explanation]

4. I wasn't his son. That was another Charlie. Intelligence and knowledge had changed me, and he would resent me—as the others from the bakery resented me—because my growth diminished him. I didn't want that. [Explanation]

5. P.S. please tel prof Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go. [Explanation]

Full title - Flowers for Algernon

Author - Daniel Keyes

Type of work - Novel

Genre - Science fiction

Language - English

Time and place written - Original short story written in 1959, in New York City; expanded novel version written during the years 1962–1965 in New York and Ohio.

Date of first publication - Short story published in 1959; expanded novel form first published in 1966

Publisher - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Narrator - Charlie Gordon, a mentally handicapped man who undergoes surgery to increase his intelligence.

Point of view - The novel is told in the form of first person "progress reports" kept by Charlie Gordon for use in the experiment designed by Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss. Everything is filtered through Charlie's mind, which alters drastically over the course of the novel as Charlie's IQ triples and then plummets again.

Tone - The tone of the novel is sympathetic to Charlie, though sometimes—particularly when he is writing as a retarded man at the beginning and end of the novel—Keyes gives us enough information to understand facts about Charlie's world that he himself cannot understand. [huh?]

Tense - Immediate past—Charlie is always writing about the days he has just lived through, with several flashbacks to his childhood which are usually told in the present tense.

Setting (time) - There is no direct reference to the time period in the novel, but it can be presumed to take place around the time it was written, the mid-1960s.

Setting (place) - New York City; one chapter takes place in Chicago

Protagonist - Charlie Gordon

Major conflict - Charlie struggles to reach emotional maturity and feel like a whole person before his skyrocketing intelligence reverses course and leaves him retarded again.

Rising action - Strauss performs an operation on Charlie that catapults his intelligence to genius levels; Charlie falls in love with Alice but finds he is unable to consummate their relationship because of unresolved childhood issues of shame

Climax - Charlie asserts his independence by running away from the scientists who are observing him; Alice tells Charlie that his work at the laboratory is more important than his relationship with Fay, and Charlie realizes in this moment that he can no longer run from his fate or the seriousness of his emotional journey

Falling action - Charlie discovers the flaw in Nemur's hypothesis that guarantees he will soon lose his intelligence; Charlie finds his mother and sister and is able to find forgiveness for them; Charlie has a brief, fulfilling romantic affair with Alice; Charlie returns to his original retarded state and checks himself into the Warren State Home

Themes - The mistreatment of the mentally disabled; intellect vs. emotion; the persistence of the past in the present

Motifs - Changes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation; flashbacks; the scientific method

Symbols - Algernon; Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge; the window

Foreshadowing - Professor Nemur tells Charlie at the outset of the experiment that his gains in intelligence may not be permanent, which turns out to be the case. Later Charlie has a memory of his young sister Norma obnoxiously threatening to lose her own intelligence, another reference to Charlie's eventual downfall. Finally, Algernon's decline, beginning in Progress Report 13, is a reliable predictor of Charlie's decline.

1. What is the significance of Charlie's relationship to Fay? How does he feel about her? What role does their relationship play in his development? [Answer]

2. When Charlie writes as a retarded man at the beginning and end of the novel, do you think that these passages are written as a retarded person genuinely might write them? Defend your answer, and explain why you think these passages are written as they are. [Answer]

3. What is the role of memory in Flowers for Algernon? How do Charlie's flashbacks further the general themes of the novel? [Answer]

4. Think about the narrative form of the novel. How does the diaristic, journal- entry form affect the emphasis of the narrative? Is Charlie dependable as a narrator as he progresses through his various stages? Is Charlie capable of providing insight into the other characters, or is he too preoccupied with himself?

5. How has Charlie changed at the end of the novel? Is he different from how he was at the beginning of the novel, and if so, how? Do you consider the ending to be tragic? Do you consider the ending to be inspiring? Explain why.

6. Does the novel make a definitive statement about the role of intelligence in human life, or does it simply explore the theme as an open-ended question? Defend your answer with examples from the book.

7. Compare and contrast the characters of Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss. How do their reactions to Charlie's intelligence differ? How do their approaches to science differ?

8. How does Algernon function as an alter-ego for Charlie? How does Algernon's condition represent Charlie's own?

1. Who asks Charlie to keep his progress reports?

2. How old is Charlie at the start of the novel?

3. Why does Miss Kinnian recommend Charlie for the experiment?

4. Who supervises Algernon's testing?

5. In which progress report does Charlie learn punctuation, spelling, and grammar?

6. Where is the scientists' convention held?

7. Where is the Center for Retarded Adults where Charlie takes classes?

8. What is the first "hard" book that Charlie reads?

9. What does Charlie decide to do when he learns that Gimpy has been stealing from Mr. Donner?

10. Which two characters suggest to Charlie that increasing his intelligence may be against God's will?

11. What is Charlie's father's doing for a living when Charlie finds him?

12. What book does Charlie tear apart near the end of the novel?

13. Which of the following is a reason that Fay proposes for Charlie's inability to make love to her?

14. What is the range of Charlie's IQ in the novel?

15. Who threatens Charlie with a knife?

16. Charlie often hallucinates that he is being watched by whom?

17. To whom does Charlie lose his virginity?

18. What is the name of the companion that Fay buys for Algernon?

19. What is the name of the quack doctor to whom Rose takes the six-year-old Charlie?

20. What does Charlie name his scientific theorem?

21. Charlie is outraged when he learns that Professor Nemur does not speak which language?

22. Nemur accuses Charlie of what during their argument after the cocktail party?

23. What does Alice tell Charlie she will do when he has reverted to his original IQ?

24. Where does Charlie go to live at the end of the novel?

25. In what month does Charlie die?