Book Review: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I love this book. It’s been a few months since I’ve read it, but I just went through all the notes and annotations I made in the novel, and it reminded me why this might be my favorite book I read in 2024. 

I didn’t know what I was in for when I picked up this short novel. It’s about Charlie, a man of low intelligence who undergoes a science experience which makes his IQ increase to genius level, and the book is a series of progress reports written by Charlie, tracking his progression into intelligence and *spoiler* his descent into his previous mental disability. Just as a warning, I didn’t really bother to avoid spoilers in this review, so if you want to skip, the main takeaway is that if you like developmental psychology, or if you just like an intense, concise close-up into a character’s mind that makes you ache, you would like this novel.

As you read, you can trace the evidence of him slowly becoming more intelligent and then losing his intelligence again. After the experiment was performed, Charlie gradually improved in spelling, grammar, memory and retention, self-awareness and ambition—and the last of all to develop was emotional intelligence, which is consistent with an average person’s natural psychological development. And then as he started to decline after the experiment ran its course, he lost everything in reverse order, down to his spelling, grammar, and short-term memory. 

The details and minutiae of evidence that Keyes includes was perfection. Charlie’s embarrassment and sense of privacy increases over time, he feels new emotions at higher levels, and he starts to rebel against authority. He has a sense of disassociation from both his childhood self—he writes about his past in the third person as if he’s telling another person’s story—and his former mentally disabled self—he sees his intelligent self as an entirely different person living in the same body of Charlie Gordon. He starts to recognize the difference between intellectual growth and emotional growth and the difference between an analytical problem and a moral one, and how an IQ increase only really helps solve the former one.

He gains a new understanding of his own past, of who he was and how people related to him, but there was also a painful confusion about it: “One of the things that confuses me is never really knowing when something comes up from my past, whether it really happened that way, or if that was the way it seemed to be at the time, or if I’m inventing it. I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up” (58). I originally noted this passage in my book because I related deeply to it, since I don’t remember my childhood well, but in the context of the book, it’s further evidence of an internal crisis of identity that only intelligence would cause him to suffer. 

Charlie’s original desire to gain intelligence and then his despair and bitterness upon losing it was palpable, as was his pain in surpassing the people of normal intelligence that he always wanted to be accepted by and equal to previously: “I was just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70” (88). And the unique fear of realizing the men who experimented on him were not necessarily deserving of his fully innocent and complete trust: “Their ideas and brilliant work made the experiment possible. I’ve got to guard against the natural tendency to look down on them now that I have surpassed them. I’ve got to realize that when they continually admonish me to speak and write simply so that people who read these reports will be able to understand me, they are talking about themselves as well. But still it’s frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don’t know all the answers” (107). Charlie also gains a sense of self-worth and protests the scientists’ treatment of him as an experiment rather than a human being, whose worth was not created by the scientists, but was inherent in his existence as a human, intelligent or not.

The very end was absolutely heartbreaking, particularly when Charlie blames himself for his declined mental state but still retains a painfully naive hope: “I dont no why Im dumb agen or what I did rong. Mabye its because I dint try hard enuf or just some body put the evel eye on me. But if I try and practis very hard mabye Ill get a littel smarter and no what all the words are” (216). And when he ends his last report by asking for someone to put flowers on Algernon’s grave (the mouse who the scientists successfully experimented on before Charlie and who clued Charlie into the fact that Charlie would become emotionally erratic and return to his previously unintelligent state). 

I have so many quotes that I am inclined to include, but that’s too much to read, so I’ll just leave with this comparison between Charlie’s intelligent self: “Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all” (139) and once he returned to his disabled state: “P.S. please tel prof Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he woud have more frends. Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go” (216).

And with Charlie’s takeaway from the experiment: “intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn. […] I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain” (173-174).