Flowers for Algernon Summary: Daniel Keyes's Story of Intelligence Gained and Lost
What it is about
Daniel Keyes wrote Flowers for Algernon as a novelette in 1958. It first appeared in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction in 1960. Keyes later expanded it into a novel, published in 1966, which was joint winner of that year's Nebula Award for Best Novel alongside Babel-17.
The story is told entirely through journal entries called progress reports, written by Charlie Gordon. Charlie is a man with an IQ of 68 who works a menial job and attends reading and writing classes because he wants to get smarter. Two researchers have developed an experimental surgical technique intended to raise intelligence. They have already tried it on a laboratory mouse named Algernon, with dramatic results. Charlie becomes the first human subject.
The spelling, grammar and punctuation of the reports change as Charlie changes. That is the engine of the book. You do not read about Charlie's mind improving, you watch the sentences themselves improve, and later you watch what happens when the process reverses. Few novels have put so much weight on the look of a page.
In the novel, Charlie is 32 and works at a bakery, a job arranged by his uncle so that he would not have to live at the Warren State Home and Training School. His classes are taught by Miss Alice Kinnian at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults. The operation works. Within three months his IQ reaches 185. The novelette version is leaner and faster; the novel gives far more room to Charlie's emotional life, his childhood memories and his family.
The main characters
Charlie Gordon is the narrator and the whole substance of the book. He is eager, trusting and keen to please at the start, and the surgery gives him an intellect that quickly outruns almost everyone around him. What it does not give him is a corresponding emotional maturity, and the gap between the two is where the pain lives.
Algernon is the mouse who went first. He is Charlie's rival in the maze tests, then his companion, and finally the clearest possible preview of Charlie's own future.
Alice Kinnian teaches Charlie's class and recommends him for the experiment. In the novel she enters a relationship with him, then breaks it off when she finds she can no longer relate to the man he has become, telling him his intelligence has changed his personality.
Professor Nemur and Dr Strauss run the experiment. As Charlie grows sharper he comes to believe that they never regarded him as a person before the operation, only as a laboratory subject. Nemur in particular is driven by his own career. Charlie's co-workers, including Joe Carp and Frank Reilly in the novelette, treated him as entertainment when he was slow and turn hostile when he is not, getting up a petition to have him removed. His mother Rose and sister Norma appear in the memories that surface after the operation. Rose physically abused him and spent money on bogus cures. Norma resented him.
The themes
The novel opens with an epigraph from Book VII of Plato's Republic about how the eye is bewildered both when it comes out of the light and when it goes into it. That is the shape of the entire book. Charlie is dazzled twice over, once on the way up and once on the way down.
Underneath the science fiction premise sits a hard question about how society treats people with intellectual disabilities. Charlie's great moment of self-recognition comes in the novelette when he catches himself joining in the mockery of a young dishwasher at a diner and turns on the other customers in the boy's defence, ashamed that he had let himself forget his own past.
Then there is the ethics of the research itself. Consent, ownership of a human life, the use of a person to advance a career. Charlie's growing understanding of what Nemur and Strauss actually wanted from him is as unsettling as anything that happens to his brain.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the book unspoiled. At the height of Charlie's intelligence, Algernon's begins to collapse. The mouse loses what he gained and dies, and Charlie buries him. Charlie works out that his own decline is coming and documents the flaw in the experiment himself, naming it the Algernon-Gordon Effect. He finishes the work just as his intelligence returns to where it started. He knows what is happening to him the whole way down. He goes back to his old job and cannot bear the pity around him. His closing request is that someone put flowers on Algernon's grave.
Why it still matters
It is taught in schools around the world, and it has been adapted repeatedly for television, theatre and radio, most famously as the 1968 film Charly, which won an Academy Award. It has also been frequently challenged for removal from libraries in the United States and Canada, sometimes successfully, which tells you how directly it handles its subject. The reason it endures is the form. A reader learns everything through the texture of Charlie's own writing, which makes the final pages almost unbearable to read and impossible to forget.
