John Nash a Beautiful Mind

Of American novels that engage with the topic of mental disability, few are more popular than Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon. Such popularity seems based on a simplistic reading of the novel where the mentally disabled are objects of good-natured compassion. A more thorough reading of how Charlie Gordon is presented, however, leads to the conclusion that mental disability is the embodiment of death in the novel. Readers are first taught to pity the pre-operative Charlie, but once they come to respond to the ethical voice of the post-operative Charlie, his regression to his original state becomes the rhetorical villain in the novel. At first an object of pity, the mentally disabled Charlie Gordon eventually becomes the metaphorical horror of oblivion that no character has the power to overcome.

In my short career of teaching undergraduates, I have found that their interest in my own scholarly work is often, at best, tepid. When I informed a few classes, however, that I was working on Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon and the role mental disability had in the novel, the emotional attachment students had to the book was clear. They nearly unanimously praised it; a few spoke of how it was the only book that interested them in high school. It was clear that even in the 21st century the Hugo-winning science fiction novel was one of the most widely read that concerns the mentally disabled. 1 Perhaps it is the surface idea of the story that explains its presence in schools: Charlie Gordon is a mentally disabled man who records his thoughts in "progress reports" as he undergoes an operation to improve his intelligence. He reaches the cognitive ability of the greatest of geniuses, ironically surpassing the doctors who operated on him. Initially, this increase in intelligence grants Charlie hope: he revels in his new cognitive abilities and his romantic relationship with Alice, his former adult education teacher. Ultimately, however, his intelligence isolates him