Flowers For Algernon Essay

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, is about a mentally disabled 32 year old man named Charlie Gordon and his transition into becoming a genius. Charlie has a operation performed on him, that was previously performed on a lab mouse named Algernon, to increase his intelligence with successful results. Charlie documents his experiences in progress reports and as time goes on after the operation, the reader can see the improvements in Charlie’s thinking through his writing. As time passes, Algernon’s physical and mental state starts to deteriorate and he dies. Charlie follows the same path as Algernon and is unintelligent again, resulting in the experiment being a failure. Keyes uses a characters and situations to convey his perspective on
Following Charlie’s operation, he is taken care of by a nurse named Hilda. Hilda is a religious woman and is a firm believer in God and claims that she wouldn’t let the scientists alter her intelligence “for all of the tea in china”. She explains to Charlie that if God wanted him to be smart He would have made Charlie that way and that the scientists have no right to alter his brain. “She says she woud never let them do things to her branes for all the tea in china. I tolld her it wasnt for tea in china. It was to make me smart. And she said mabey they got no rite to make me smart because if god wantid me to be smart he would have made me born that way” (Keyes 16). After Charlie’s intelligence increases When Charlie was let go from the bakery, one of his colleagues named Fanny reiterates the theme of man playing God by lecturing him about how he shouldn’t have wanted more than God intended of him to be. “If you’d read your Bible, Charlie, you’d know that it’s not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord in the first place” (Keyes 107). Keyes uses both of these thoughts to introduce his opinion on that man shouldn’t play or put themselves above