Disabilities In Flowers For Algernon By Daniel Keyes

Many people are born with different kinds of disabilities which can prevent them from living their lives normally. Infact, approximately three percent of all babies born in the United States are born with some form of malformation at birth. (Robert Bernstein) It is estimated that about every one in five people have some type of disability in the United States. Whether it’s difficulty hearing, seeing or thinking, living with a disability can be very challenging and that is why there were more benefits for Charlie as a result of his experiment.

In the story “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, 37 year old Charlie Gordon was born with a mental disability that prevented him from learning normally and had an IQ of 68. He is approached with

“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes- how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence. It infuriated me to think that not too long ago, I, like this boy, had foolishly played the clown. But today in looking at that boy, for the first time I saw what I had been.” (Keyes, 237) Before Charlie had gotten his intelligence, he was just like that boy and didn’t realise that people were making fun of him. Now that he’s done the operation, he is aware of how other people treated him and how other people treat others and he knows that not everyone is a good person. He now has real feelings and feels sympathy for the boy. “Everyone was looking at me and laughing and I felt naked. I wanted to hide myself. I ran out into the street and I threw up. It’s a funny thing I never knew that Joe and Frank and the others liked to have me around all the time to make fun of me. Now I know what it means when they say ‘to pull a Charlie Gordon.’ I’m ashamed.” (Keyes, 231) He had never known how people had treated him before the operation. Now that he knows that his “friends” were really just abusing him, he can surround himself with better people. Without the operation, he would keep hanging around them and had never realised that he was a joke to