I’m a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon’s knife. And I have to love someone.
Flowers for Algernon is a 1966 science-fiction novel written by Daniel Keyes, based on his 1959 short story of the same name. It follows Charlie Gordon, a mentally handicapped 37-year-old who is chosen for a bold new operation to increase his intelligence.
I sat down with Matt and Eddy, two aspiring Melbourne authors, to discuss what makes Flowers for Algernon such a timeless and poignant text, more than half a century after its publication. You can find our full discussion here.
The value of perspective
Flowers is told entirely from Charlie’s perspective, in diegetic Progress Reports he’s been asked to write in order to track his intellectual development. Every word we read has been penned by Charlie for the purpose of the experiment, creating a level of intentionality in the scenes we are shown, and the thoughts and feelings Charlie chooses to share with us—and the scientists. This is given explicit attention during a scene in the second act, where Charlie expresses discomfort in knowing all his thoughts will be immediately read and dissected by the people studying him, prompting them to find a compromise where he can keep the reports to himself until the very end of the experiment.
From that point on, we have special insight into the tragedy of Charlie’s trajectory; while other characters only see his actions, the outbursts, bouts of arrogance and emotional dysregulation, we see the frenetic effort he’s constantly exerting to self-correct, to learn, to get to the heart of the new aspect of humanity he’s only just now experiencing.
Another benefit of us being locked in Charlie’s head for the whole book is shown through Keyes’ use of flashbacks—experienced not just by the reader, but by Charlie himself. Rather than take breaks from the present-day narrative of the story to give us insight into Charlie’s past, Keyes integrates them into Charlie’s present experience, showing him reacting to his own repressed memories as they re-emerge. We become invested in the flashbacks not only because we get to learn something about Charlie, but because we get to see Charlie learn from them.
Haunted by the past
Charlie’s reactions to his past—and present—give us an emotional anchor with which to explore society’s interaction with mental health and reactions to the disabled. We see the negative impacts of society’s stigma: he is physically abused repeatedly by his mother for being a slower learner than most children his age, sent to a quack doctor who uses electroshock therapy to unsuccessfully increase his intelligence, and his mother even pulls a knife on him at one point, before forcing him to leave her care for good.
We see at every turn how helpless the family is in dealing with Charlie, because of the lack of support, empathy and understanding in the society around him, doubly impacted due to what is strongly implied to be undiagnosed mental illness affecting his mother. Our rage at his mistreatment is honed on the whetstone of Charlie’s own horror at rediscovering the circumstances of his upbringing, and mirrors what is shown throughout the rest of the book: the easy abuse Charlie suffers at the hands of the bakery employees, the sterile infantilisation of the residents at the Warren Institute, even the mockery made of the ‘slow’ waiter Charlie observes dropping a plate in a crowded restaurant.
Cutting social commentary
Keyes’ highlighting of society’s blase stigma isn’t reserved solely for the mentally disabled, either: almost every character has an internal way that prevents them in some way from measuring up to the impossible standards of our culture.
Fay, the artist and dancer who shocks Charlie out of his sexual dissociation, is shown to actively resist many societal standards and pressures. Through her Charlie (and the reader) experiences a different type of societal critique: not one out of either naivete or superiority, but frivolity. However, she ultimately struggles to find comfort or build healthy relationships, with men mistaking her bohemian, easy-going attitude for implicit sexual consent.
Professor Nemur is a smart man who yearns to be a genius, to the point of constantly being intellectually intimidated in the presence of other scientists. It’s not enough to him (or his wife) that he be a smart man; he must be the smartest—no, he must be known as the smartest.
Charlie’s mother is so obsessed with the unattainable perception of perfection that, as Charlie says, nothing was more important to her than what other people thought of her. It drives her to the horrific actions shown in the flashbacks, and culminates with her in old age, polishing the already-clean floors of her house in a bout of psychosis, concerned with nonexistent house guests’ disappointment with nonexistent dirt.
Keyes uses Charlie’s eyes to show us, across the scale of innocent undiluted empathy to hypercritical neurotic genius, exactly how much of our society’s construction is flawed. How heavily it weighs upon each person within it, and how much of it is enforced by the implicit assumption that this is how things should be done.
None of this commentary feels forced or preachy, nor does it feel dated — which for an almost 60-year-old novel about mental illness, is a striking achievement. Each of the criticisms is made by Charlie, aimed at the people treating him as subhuman, and so rather than preaching, the book forces us to sit in his own suffering and discomfort until we feel complicit for the system that has tormented him his entire life.
Final thoughts
The other characters feel deeply real, grounded with a naturalism that can be hard to find in science fiction. Each character exists as a distinct person independent of the story, rather than just for Charlie’s benefit, and many have underlying motivations that remain unexpressed, represented only through their actions—just like people in the real world.
Ultimately, Keyes uses his self-imposed constraints to his advantage, allowing what commentary and allegories naturally exist within his premise to come to the forefront without any poking or prodding.
