A progress report from Charlie Gordon
Flowers for Algernon began as a short story in 1959. It won the Hugo Award, and Daniel Keyes expanded it into a novel in 1966, which shared the Nebula Award for best novel. Keyes drew on his years teaching English to students in special classes in New York. One of them, he said, asked whether he could become smart if he worked hard enough.
The novel is told entirely in progress reports written by Charlie Gordon. Charlie is 32 years old, with an IQ of 68. He sweeps floors and runs deliveries at Donner's Bakery in New York, and he goes to a night class for adults with low IQ at Beekman University, where Alice Kinnian teaches him to read and write. Two scientists at the university, Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss, have developed a surgical procedure that raises intelligence. It has worked on a white mouse named Algernon, who can now beat Charlie through a maze. Alice recommends Charlie for the experiment because he wants to learn more than any student she has had.
The first reports are short and full of spelling errors. Charlie writes "progris riport" and describes the inkblot test, which confuses him because he cannot see any pictures in the ink. The form of the book is its main device. As Charlie's mind grows, the spelling corrects itself, the sentences lengthen, and the vocabulary expands. The reader watches the change happen on the page.
The operation and the climb
Charlie has the operation in March. Nothing seems to change at first, and he is frustrated that he is still losing races to Algernon. Then the gains come fast. He learns punctuation, reads whole books, picks up languages and begins to understand things that were hidden from him before.
The first thing intelligence shows him is what his life had actually been. At the bakery, his coworkers Joe Carp and Frank Reilly had called a stupid mistake "pulling a Charlie Gordon." They took him to parties to laugh at him. He had thought they were his friends. He also discovers that Gimpy, the head baker, is stealing from Mr. Donner. Charlie has to decide what to do, and he realizes that moral questions are hard for anyone, not just for a man with a low IQ. He confronts Gimpy, and the stealing stops.
Mr. Donner promotes Charlie to the mixing machines, but the workers grow uneasy around him. Frank and Joe stop talking to him. The staff signs a petition, and Donner lets Charlie go. His IQ passes 185. He now knows more than the scientists who made him, and he can see their vanity and their limits. He tells Nemur that he was a person before the operation too, and that nobody treated him like one.
One scene stays with most readers. In a diner, a young dishwasher with a low IQ drops a tray of dishes. The crowd laughs, and Charlie laughs with them. Then he sees the boy's blank, eager smile and understands that he is watching himself. He shouts at the customers that the boy is a human being. From then on he wants to use his mind for people like the one he was.
Alice, Fay and the other Charlie
Charlie falls in love with Alice Kinnian. She cares for him and admits that she feels the same. But every time they get close, Charlie panics. He feels that the old Charlie is still inside him, watching from a dark corner, and the feeling comes from his childhood. His mind has outgrown his emotions. Soon it has outgrown Alice too. He grows impatient when she cannot follow his thinking, and they drift apart.
He moves into an apartment and meets Fay Lillman, a painter who lives across the hall. Fay is free, funny and careless. She knows nothing about his past, so the old Charlie does not get in the way. With her he drinks, dances and sleeps. But Fay cannot share his work, and the relationship stays shallow.
Keyes uses these two women to show two halves of Charlie. Alice belongs to the person he was and the person he wants to be. Fay belongs to the person he has become for a short time. Neither can hold the whole man.
The family: Rose, Matt and Norma
The operation also unlocks memory. Charlie remembers his mother, Rose, who refused to accept that he was different. She punished him for wetting himself and dragged him to doctors who promised cures. When his sister Norma was born normal, Rose turned on him and treated him as a danger to her. His father, Matt, tried to protect him but gave in. Rose finally forced Matt to send Charlie away, and he ended up with an uncle and then at the Warren State Home.
Charlie now understands where his sexual panic comes from. Rose had threatened him with a knife when he was a teenager to make sure he never touched a girl. The terror is still in him.
He tracks his father to a barbershop in the Bronx. Matt gives him a shave and never recognizes him. Charlie does not say who he is. Later he visits Rose and Norma in Brooklyn. Rose is old and confused. Norma, who used to resent him, welcomes him and says she is sorry. Then Rose, in a moment of panic, picks up a kitchen knife and orders him out, convinced that he is going to hurt Norma. Charlie leaves. He has got what he came for: he knows who his family were, and he can stop hating them.
Chicago and the Algernon-Gordon Effect
Nemur and Strauss take Charlie and Algernon to a psychology convention in Chicago to present their results. Nemur treats Charlie as a specimen and talks about him as if he were not in the room. Charlie discovers that Nemur has not read research in other languages and that the experiment was rushed. Worse, Algernon has started behaving strangely. He has stopped eating and will not run the maze.
Charlie opens Algernon's cage during the presentation and lets him loose in the hall. In the confusion he takes the mouse and flies back to New York. He rents the apartment where he meets Fay, hides from the scientists for a while, then returns to the lab on his own terms to study what is happening to Algernon.
He visits the Warren State Home, the institution where he will be sent if the experiment fails. He sees the crowded wards and the kind, tired staff. He wants to know where he is going.
His research produces a short paper. The finding he names the Algernon-Gordon Effect says that artificial intelligence gained through the surgery decays, and that the faster the rise, the faster the fall. Algernon dies. Charlie buries him in the backyard of his building and puts flowers on the grave.
