Daniel Keyes Mistreating People With Mental Disabilities

One of the most important issue that Daniel Keyes wants to convey is mistreating people with mental disability. In this story, Charlie believes that Joe and Frank were his friends and believes that they liked him; however, Joe and Frank were using Charlie for the sake of their own entertainment by misleading him to do which aren’t healthy, for example, mixing drugs or dose of medicine in his drink, leaving him alone in the night time, and later lying that the police had beaten him up. This shows us how people who don’t have mental disability try to take advantage and mistreat those who have one. In our real world, everybody isn’t nice, people try to lure each other for their own sake and advantages; additionally people like to make fun of disabled people and belittle them for whom they are, just how the people at Charlie’s work did.
Charlie in the story wanted to be smart to have more friends and make people like him, what we the readers can assume as fitting in. Though Charlie probably didn’t know what fitting in meant before his surgery, it shows us how he was desperate to be smart even though it might hurt him tremendously, or even just be temporary. This example shows us that he was putting a mask, and obscuring himself and being somebody completely different, not even realizing what the end result might be. Keys wants to explain how the people in the world want to change themselves completely just to fit in and get liked by others, an example would be people trying tattoos and being punk to be like the people around them when they, from the inside, dislike tattoos and being