Flowers for Algernon | |||||
Daniel Keyes | |||||
Orion Millennium, 216 pages | |||||
A review by Stephen M. Davis
Charlie Gordon is a retarded worker in a bakery, who sweeps floors, acts as the butt for other's jokes, and
struggles to learn to read under the guidance of Alice Kinnian. His situation takes a dramatic turn when he
undergoes brain surgery designed to help reorder his brain tissue and to grant him intelligence.
Mr. Keyes does a skillful job of showing us Charlie's meteoric rise from retardation to universal genius, and
his tragic return to his original state. What we see along the way is that intelligence without compassion
is fruitless. We also get what feels like a very realistic portrayal of the psychological growth of someone
who gets a kind of accelerated childhood, in which a grown man discovers through psychotherapy and his own
dawning intelligence that he is filled with repressed impulses and half-understood memories of major import
to his own mental well-being.
Charlie must struggle with feelings of love for his former teacher, with his sense of abandonment at the hands
of his mother, and with his anger towards a sister who committed seemingly senseless acts of cruelty against
Charlie in their childhood.
At the end, the reader will have to decide if Charlie is better off than he was at the beginning of the book,
and if being a genius was ultimately worth something of permanent value to him.
Steve Davis teaches at the University of New Orleans as an Instructor of English. He enjoys chess, strong black coffee, and books by authors who care enough to work at their craft. |
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