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.

3rd Quarter Independent Reading Reflection

Books I read this quarter:
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Pet Sematary by Stephen King
Tomorrow There Will be Apricots by Jessica Soffer
If I Stay by Gayle Forman

This quarter, I met my goals of (1) finishing The Scarlet Letter, which took me FOREVER because it is such a hefty read, and (2) reading at least 5 books (close.. I read 5.5 because I’m halfway through Pet Sematary). Meeting my goals was something of a struggle this quarter because the combination of Scioly and other classes (cough aphuge cough) and social pressures and other sundry struggles literally drove me to my wit’s end, but I managed to pull through by forcing myself to sit down and read. It actually helped relieve my anxiety from my stress sometimes.

During 4th quarter, I want to (1) read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which my mom recently read and thought I would like, and which is also a classic, and (2) read at least six books, more than I read this quarter. Also, Goodreads told me that I need to read at least 2 books a month to keep up with my 2016 reading challenge, so 6 books seems to be a good bottom-line estimate for March-April-May.

Point of View - Sheila Moss

Home on the Kitchen Range 

I'm a Mosquito Banquet 

Sheila Moss’s point of view in her columns can best be described as humor. In “Home on the Kitchen Range”, Moss uses a slightly annoyed and self-deprecating tone to tell readers about her terrible luck with kitchen appliances, using low diction to help her connect with her readers, repetition, and sarcastic comments inserted with parentheses. In her other column, “I’m a Mosquito Banquet”, she again uses purposeful diction and repetition as well as simile and rhetorical question to complain about the fact that mosquitoes seem to be very attracted to her. She also uses an alternating fact-opinion structure in this column to state a fact or theory about the behavior of mosquitoes or how to repel them, followed by sarcastic, self-deprecating ideas of her own.

Moss’s use of low or funny diction is especially effective in helping her establish a relaxed, self-deprecating tone that allows readers to laugh both with and at her unfortunate circumstances. For instance, she starts off one of her columns with a very conversational voice: “I give up, I tell you. I give up” (“Kitchen Range”). This instantly establishes the author herself as the column’s object of ridicule. In addition, Moss also concludes her column with the same opening sentence; this repetition again reinforces her main idea and indicates her frustration that she has still not reached a solution to her appliance problems by the end of the column. By maintaining low diction throughout the column, using words and phrases such as “coughed up” and “whatever that is” to describe her problems with kitchen appliances, Moss puts readers at ease to join her in mocking her and to not take her comments too seriously. In the other column, “I’m a Mosquito Banquet”, Moss again stays true to the purposeful diction that characterizes her writing style and a self-deprecating tone. Her main problem in this column is that she is “a casserole on the mosquito smorgasbord” (“Mosquito”). A “smorgasbord” is a buffet meal featuring a varied number of dishes. This diction, while not exactly low, is certainly very interesting. It stands out in the column and is also intertwined with a metaphor to help make a point: Moss is extremely popular among mosquitoes, much like a casserole is a popular dish at a buffet. Overall, Moss’s low or unusual diction helps her make her points clear and allows readers to laugh along with her at her misfortunes.

Things I Learned Last Year

Things I Learned Last Year

Sweat drops and teardrops are both salty.

Every cell in your skin 

is replaced every four months.

Hangnails don't go away

unless you cut them.

A violin hickey

is a badge of honor

that gets you places.

Scars heal from the inside out.

The more you pick at split ends,

the more of them you get.

Everything you see on a person's exterior 

is dead.

The faster you rip off a band-aid,

the less it hurts, but first you have to 

be brave enough.

2015. What a year. Filled with the starkest of contrasts: success and failure, forgiveness and revenge, defiance and conformity, pride and guilt, passion and regret, a few steps closer to finding myself—2015 saw it all.

My poem focuses on a few specific aspects of my life the past year, using skin or hair to symbolize something different in every stanza. The first two or three stanzas simply sound like statements with a matter-of-fact tone, but this progresses into slight arrogance in the fourth stanza, pain and remembrance in the fifth, regret in the sixth, reflection in the seventh, and reflection and empowerment (the only positive stanza!) in the last. Only after reading through the last few stanzas does it become apparent that each statement, even the ones in the beginning that seem like simple facts, have a symbolic meaning. Overall, the tone of the poem is reflective and melancholy/slightly regretful.

I sort of tried to mirror Stafford's poem structure by using run-on lines and only one thought per stanza. I also paid attention to the number of lines in each stanza (something I do not normally like to do), which is a 1-2-2-3-1-2-2-3 pattern. I did not really use any of the other features in his poem, like sentence structures or the topics he used. Mine was less about what I learned about the world in general, and more about a specific, personal reflection about how I have grown.