The past can hurt when you remember all of it, but would you trade this hurt for not remembering something you learned yesterday? This was the case for one man, Charlie Gordon, a retarded adult who works in a bakery and attends the Beekman College and is the protagonist in Daniel Keye’s award winning novel, Flowers for Algernon. He undergoes an operation that makes him smart for a little while and later, as a man-made genius, finds the fault in the experiment that the operation is not permanent therefore it eventually pushes him back into his original state. He did not know it at the time but he had a happy life as a simpleton. He uses flashbacks to reveal how he understands this after his operation. After he undergoes the operation he uses …show more content…
It stood for an understanding in Charlie that he felt they both had between each other because they were both subjects in the experiment and they both were just trying to have a better life. Another example is the boy looking at Charlie through the window pane when Charlie, in the end of the story, goes to visit his mother. He knows that the boy looking at Charlie is himself looking at Charlie, who has more problems now than what the little boy Charlie ever had and he was better off than what he is now. The progress reports that Charlie writes in his point of view are influential because they show the emotional damage Charlie suffers due to his past through these literary techniques. He explains his experiences involving his friends at work that will no longer talk to him because of his genius capabilities that now makes them all look bad because he did not know originally they were using his retardation as a way to make themselves seem superior to other people. This is an important aspect of the book that gives the reader more understanding of the whole situation. He is important as the narrator because his memories explain in vivid detail and they exploit his actions he takes in the story due to the actual meaning behind them because of his past, in other words, the way he feels about situations now as opposed to how he dealt with them then. For instance, the way he feels about his new neighbor from across the hall in his apartment that he later gets for himself and Algernon, Fay. She is very carefree as opposed to Charlie's mind full of logic. He wants to be intimate with her, but his emotions are not as advanced as his IQ along with the fact that, when he was a boy, his mother would punish him if he even looked at a girl which makes it hard for him to even have a relationship with her. These all in turn
Character- The main character Charlie is developed in many ways throughout the story. His whole demeanor changed from page one. He actually started smoking in the middle of the book. “When I light it, I didn’t cough. It actually felt soothing. I know that’s bad in a health class kind of way, but it was true.”-pg 102 His personality was different after that. He always tried to be friendly to anyone he met but if you weren’t nice to his friends he didn’t really respect them after that. His dialogue is very similar throughout the whole book. He is very friendly when he talks and tries to be polite. Charlie is trying to make friends and keep them. He succeeds with some coaching from his english teacher who Charlie calls Bill. Bill gave him books to read and graded Charlie’s reports. “He says that I have a great skill at reading and understanding language.”- pg 9-10. A’s showed on Charlie’s report card but Bill gave Charlie different grades. The books Bill gave Charlie changed his mind about a lot of things. Bill developed Charlie through the whole book.
Through his eyes, we are able to see racism and segregation in the Corrigan community at the time and how Charlie makes sense of all of it. Charlie is still coming of age and through his moral and educational development in the novel Charlie starts to understand what his position is in the community, as well as his relationships with people. Charlie is not subject to racism, but his friends are which enables us to see just how racism worked and how people’s ignorance ignited it. Silvey is using Charlie to teach us to look past labels and to make our own judgment on someone not just by their reputation or appearance.
Everyone knows that every story has two sides, but the tricky part is figuring out which side to believe. In the short story “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keys, Charlie Gordon, a 37-year-old man with a mental handicap, has an operation performed on him to artificially increase his intelligence. Before and after the operation, there were drastic changes in the lives of Charlie and all those around him. While the operation caused many twists and turns for Charlie and his peers, the pros far outweighed the cons.
.... As his intelligence advances, Charlie becomes aggressive and hostile after realizing how he was taken for granted. He can no longer tolerate his former coworkers, because he still remembers the humiliation at their hands. His friends at the factory become threatened by his new personality and growing intelligence, and petition to fire him out of the factory. This led to Charlie becoming isolated and lonely. Once Charlie became a genius, he became a little arrogant and even egotistical. This, in turn, makes him lose his friends and all of his happiness in his simple life. Because his progress reports are written in first point of view, you can infer how his personality changed from amiable to hostile. At the end, he hopes someone will continue and fix the error in Dr. Nemur and Strauss's experiment. From this, you can conclude that what he is writing is the truth.
Charlie writes letters to an unknown “friend” throughout the novel, revealing the loss of his friend Michael Dobson to suicide and the hurt he still feels over the loss of his favorite aunt Helen eight years prior. Charlie is shy, yet witty and curious of the world around him. He starts these letters as a way to cope with starting high school, the thought of doing it alone frightens him. Once he starts high school he connects with his English teacher, bill. Bill realizes...
Therefore, Even though Charlie becomes mentally retarded by the end, he becomes a more complete person. Charlie undergoes a lot of changes during his journey. He matures which contributes to his intelligence growth, learns significant life lesson, and realizes that he is better of being mentally retarded rather than a genius. Charlie does not realize the fact that after becoming a genius, he is as far away from his goal of being normal and fitting in as he is being mentally retarded.
... mistakes. Charlie is not ready, to change himself, since he repeats his past misdeeds. It seems like he will never be able to change or be happy about what he has or had in his past. There is no money in the world, which can help him. The story "babylon revisited" has anticlimax end, and Charlie left empty handed. In life any person, who tries change has to put a lot of efforts and time, to do it. If a person wishes to change himself, the first step he has to take is to remember his past mistakes and stay away from them. A past of a person will be always a part of him. He can never escape or ignore it, but he can learn from it and change himself. Every person has to learn how to use his/her unpleasant experience of the past as an advantage, to stay away from his past misdeeds, to build a bright future.
For Charlie, Ignorance is bliss. He realizes that his so called ?friends? were just using him to entertain their perverse humor. Also, he was also fired from the job that he loved so much because his new intelligence made those around him feel inferior and scared. This sends Charlie into a short depression. His life was better before the experiment because he had a job he looked forward to and ?friends?.
He regularly attends night classes for Retarded Adults at Beekman College and Ms. Alice Kinnian, his teacher, recommends Charlie to undergo an experiment that will raise his IQ to that of a genius. Dr. Strauss and Professor Nemur are in charge of such experiment and they have successfully raised the intelligence of a white mouse named Algernon. With a willingness to learn, Charlie accepts to participate. After the operation, Charlie goes back to work and realizes that his “friends” pick and tease him. Then they ban together to get Charlie fired because they do not like his newfound intelligence. Charlie then spends most of his time reading at the university and begins to regain memories of his forgotten childhood. It does not take long for Charlie to surpass both Nemur and Strauss and discovers a fatal flaw in the experiment. Nemur’s remarks about how he viewed Charlie as a lab rat made Charlie mad, and so he takes Algernon and escapes from the lab. Charlie notices Algernon’s intelligence beginning to fade and speculates the same will happen to him, and so he begins to solve the flaw. During this, he befriends a woman named Fray and recalls more memories of his youth. Charlie’s mother was in denial about his retardation and would always try to come up with ideas that would make Charlie normal. This excessive desire faded
... reader. Throughout the book, Charlie unfolds secrets and truths about the world and the society that he lives in; secrets and truths that cause him to grow up and transition into adulthood. He also makes a life changing decision and rebelled against was he thought was the right thing. This reflects his maturity and bravery throughout the journey he travels that summer. Charlie eyes suddenly become open to the injustice that the town of Corrigan demonstrates. He also comes to face the issue of racism; not only shown towards his best friend Jeffrey and the Lu family but to Jasper Jones as well. He realises the town of Corrigan is unwilling to accept outsiders. Charlie not only finds out things that summer about the people that surround him, but he also finds out who he is personally.
In this novel, Flowers for Algernon, written by Daniel Keyes, a man named Charlie Gordon has an operation done to increase his intelligence. He started as a mentally retarded man and slowly became a genius. He seemed to soak up information like a sponge and he was able to figure out the most complex scientific formulas. The only problem with the operation is that it does not last for ever and in his remaining time he tries to figure out why it is not permanent. He will eventually lose everything he learned and become worse off than when he started, so Charlie was better off before he had the operation.
Charlie struggles with apparent mental illness throughout his letters, but he never explicitly addresses this problem. His friends make him realize that he is different and it is okay to be different from everyone else. This change in perspective gives Charlie new opportunities to experience life from a side he was unfamiliar with. Without these new friends, Charlie would have never dared to try on the things he has. His friends have helped him develop from an antisocial wallflower to an adventurous young man who is both brave and loyal. Transitioning shapes how the individual enters into the workforce, live independently and gain some control over their future
We can all sympathize with Charlie on the surface, we have all made mistakes that we have to live with. Charlie is attempting to move forward with his life and erase the mistakes of his past. The ghosts of his past torment him repeatedly throughout the story, his child's guardians despise him and his old friends do not understand him.
As they drive through the tunnel, Charlie begins living in the moment and soaking up what the present has to offer. Many times throughout his letters, Charlie describes the situations of other people and tries to sink deeper into the causes of their actions, but this drive marks the first time Charlie focuses on himself, his friendship and on how he is feeling infinite in that moment. He feels as if he and his friends can do anything or feel anything. He believes that happiness is not out of reach. The tunnel signifies hardships that Charlie has faced, but the light at the end of the tunnel signifies how he overcomes those obstacles. In the end he emerges with two friends that understand him more than his family ever
As soon as Dahl introduces Charlie to the reader, he is tapping into the young readers anxieties by opening their imagination. He uses the real life possibility of becoming very poor, like Charlie, to tell children “real life is not all sunny” and sometimes there are some misfortunes in life that one has to face. Dahl introduces Charlie to the reader as a very poor child who is living with “six grownups…in a small wooden house on the edge of a great town” where “life was extremely uncomfortable” because they were “far too poor” (Dahl, 4-5)...