Book Review: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

All Charlie Gordon wanted was to be smart.

As a 32-year old man with an IQ of 68, working as a janitor at a bakery, all he wanted was to be like everyone else. All he wanted was to go back and make his mother proud.

His dreams come true when he becomes the first-ever human to undergo surgery to increase his intelligence (the only other individual ever to have had this surgery is a mouse named Algernon), successfully blasting his IQ to a shocking 185. Yet after copious gains of knowledge and exploration in many fields and discussions with scholars and months of writing progress reports and drunken parties and extensive research, Charlie realizes that he is not happy. His relationships with people, such as his co-workers and the professors studying his change and an attractive woman, Alice, rapidly deteriorate, and he feels angered by the fact that others view him as merely a subject of a scientific study, not as a human being. While he was once ridiculed as nothing more than a silly animal, he is now avoided because of his detachment from others. Things take a sudden, heart-wrenching turn, however, when both Charlie and Algernon rapidly regress, losing all that they once had.

Daniel Keyes’s award-winning science fiction novel, Flowers for Algernon, criticizes society’s view and treatment of the mentally disabled, explores the conflict between intellect and emotion, scrutinizes ways that one’s subconscious can uncover traumatic memories later in life, questions the morality of artificially enhanced intelligence. Is it ethical to treat a human being as a scientific experiment? And at what point does human life begin this decrease in value?

Do we choose to compensate the value of human life for the progress of science, or compensate the progress of science to preserve the value of human life?

The thought-provoking and incredibly sad story has been adapted many times into films and television shows, including the Academy Award-winning 1968 film, Charly, and a 2000 television movie, Flowers for Algernon, both of which offer new perspectives on the original story.