About the Book
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys is an engrossing metamorphosis story about a man named Charlie who undergoes an experimental operation to increase his intelligence. He starts out intellectually disabled with an IQ in the 60s and ends up smarter than the researchers who designed the experiment. But Charlie learns that super-intelligence is not the key to getting what he wants most — family, friends, and companionship. For that, he’s dependent on the rest of us to accept him no matter what his IQ is.
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Dig Deeper
- A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen (Author)
- Disability and Autism Booklist for Children and Young Adults
- Appropriate Terms to Use When Speaking About People With Disabilities
- New York Times Profile of Daniel Keyes
- Charly (1968 Academy Award Winning Film Adaptation)
- Flowers for Algernon (2000 TV Movie Adaptation)
- Atypical (Netflix series about an 18 year old boy on the spectrum)
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Transcript
INTRO
Here is a reflection on reading from Malorie Blackman:
"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while."
Welcome to episode 3 of the WE SHOULD ALL BE BOOKWORMS podcast. I’m your host, Mykella, a budding novelist and a bonafide bookworm. In this episode I will introduce you to Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
Flowers for Algernon is an engrossing metamorphosis story about a man named Charlie who undergoes an experimental operation to increase his intelligence. He starts out intellectually disabled with an IQ in the 60s and ends up smarter than the researchers who designed the experiment.
But what Charlie wants most is what we all want — family, friends, and companionship. And in this story he learns what we all learn throughout our lives — that a super powered intelligence is not the key to relationships. Ironically, the smarter Charlie gets, the harder it is for him to navigate our pretty screwed up world that has trouble loving and accepting the outliers among us.
So join me today as we preview this story. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just finished reading your 33rd book so far this year, or you can’t even remember the last time you read a book — this podcast is for you. In fact, if we can change the world one book at a time, then we should all be bookworms.
One of my favorite TV shows is Netflix’s “Atypical”. It follows an autistic young man as he graduates high school and goes off to college, learning to navigate independence. He has some big challenges but for the most part he is thriving because he is adored by his family and there are counselors and organizations that help support him.
Flowers for Algernon is an intimate look at what it means to be intellectually disabled or autistic or otherwise “Atypical” in a world that doesn’t tolerate difference, a world where your family gets rid of you because they’re afraid or ashamed of you and a world where the only support is a cold, prison-like institution.
That’s the core heartbreak of Charlie Gordon’s life in this book. It’s a life that could have been great! His disability is not the primary cause of most of his pain in life. It’s the inability of his family and wider community to accept and love him as he is. Instead, everyone looks at him as a problem to be fixed, abused, hidden or ignored.
But you, dear reader, will see that Charlie is a great guy and it would be a privilege to count him as a friend. Because the book is written as a series of diary entries, we get an intimate look into Charlie’s thoughts and we see how optimistic and warm and kind he is.
I should note that since this book was written in the late 1950s, it describes Charlie and others like him in politically incorrect ways. Instead of using the phrase mental retardation, which is repeated several times throughout the book, the medical community prefers to say intellectually disabled today. So that’s how I will refer to Charlie’s condition.
And isn’t it a good thing that our terminology has evolved over the years and will probably continue to evolve? Words have so much power and we can harness that power do and be better towards each other.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Flowers for Algernon is Daniel Keyes best known novel. It was a mega-mega best seller with more than 5 million copies sold, inspired several TV adaptations, and was the basis for the film Charlie. The lead actor, Cliff Robertson, won an Academy Award for the role.
Daniel Keyes says the idea for this story struck him out of nowhere while riding in an elevator. But it took him 15 years to expand that idea into a short story. I’ve been tinkering with my ideas for a novel for the last few years, and sometimes I feel like I’m taking too long and it’s too late. But what Keyes accomplished with Flowers for Algernon is an inspiration to me because it’s proof that — forgive me, I know this is corny but I’m gonna say it anyway — It’s never too late to pursue your dreams.
Anyway - that short story won the Hugo Award for best short fiction in 1960 and a few years later, Keyes expanded the short story version of Flowers for Algernon into a novel, and the novel won the Nebula Award and then went on to do gangbusters commercially. Within the first few pages of reading it, you will see why people all over the world are captivated by Charlie’s journey.
PLOT SUMMARY
Now, let’s review a quick summary of the plot:
The book is told in diary form by Charlie, a man with an IQ of about 68. He’s had an intellectual disability all his life and is excited to be chosen for an experimental operation to increase his intelligence.
The spelling of the words in the beginning diary entries are intentionally messed up to force it to be more difficult to read. It slows you down and forces you to focus, in the same way you might have to pause and listen carefully when talking to someone with an intellectual disability. And gradually, as the experiment starts to work, the language gets easier and easier to read until at times it’s even a bit too advanced for most of us.
So the experiment definitely works and we follow Charlie’s private thoughts as he experiences what most of us can only dream of — becoming a “super” version of ourselves. If you’ve seen the movie The Incredibles, that’s what superheros are called - Supers. And that’s what I thought of when reading this book. For humans, it is our intelligence that makes us the “Supers” of this planet. So the ultimate superpower for a human being is to take what already sets us apart from all the other species and turbo-charge it, right?
And in this book, Charlie gets to experience watching himself transform into a super enhanced version of himself — something he’s always wanted to be.
But, of course, it isn’t all sunshine and roses. The main reason Charlie signs up for the experiment is because all of his life he’s believed that if he could just be smart like everyone else, then people would like him and he’d have friends and he wouldn’t be so lonely anymore. So what he really wants is relationships, not smarts.
Charlie is warm and optimistic and kind. He is eager to please and quick to forgive. And when people tease him in mean spirited ways, he’s just happy to be among people who are laughing, and he doesn’t always understand that they are laughing at him. He’s very lonely, but he’s not despairing. He’s ever hopeful that if he just works harder, he’ll get better, and then people will like him more.
But as his intelligence grows, that innocence dies and he sees the truth about the way people have treated him throughout his life. This truth hardens him. He becomes cold and stand-offish. He is paranoid and holds grudges. He rejects people before they have a chance to reject him. And there’s a despair about him. He learns that Intelligence alone won’t get him the friends and family he thought it would. He’s more lonely than ever before, and he has to fight to climb out of a depression.
Fortunately, Charlie’s core ambitious and optimistic spirit prevails and he decides to use the gift of his new super-intelligence to improve the flaws he discovered in the experimental study. Even though many people have failed him through his life, he decides that his goal will be make the world a better place for others anyway.
Which circles right back to the beginning. Because that’s what Charlie was doing all along before the experiment, as a son, a student, a childhood playmate, a bakery worker — it’s just that very few people recognized the skills and gifts that he had to give because they couldn’t appreciate that they were coming from someone so different from themselves.
FAVORITE STORY MOMENT
“How does a person go about learning how to act toward another person?”
This is one of the questions Charlie asks himself as his intelligence approaches an average level. Because of his disability, people have stayed far away from him and he never learned how to develop and navigate relationships. He could have learned more than he did. Disability does not mean inability. People just never gave him the chance. They didn’t have enough patience with him.
But as he becomes more and more “neurotypical,” he discovers a new challenge. And that challenge is coming to grips with how badly humans treat each other.
In one of my favorite story moments we witness Charlie at work. Charlie’s been working in a bakery for many years doing janitorial tasks. His employer, Mr. Donner, was a friend of his Uncle who secured the job for him before he passed away. Mr. Donner is the closest thing Charlie has to family and he’s kept Charlie employed for many years so that he can stay out of the institution his family committed him to long ago.
As the experiment starts to work, Charlie picks up more complex tasks and notices more about how the bakery is run, contributing to improvements here and there. He also notices a long time, trusted employee stealing. This man’s name is Gimpy and Charlie has always looked up to Gimpy. Gimpy was even one of Charlie’s primary defenders when other employees took practical jokes too far with Charlie.
But when Charlie sees Gimpy stealing he is horrified. He feels an impulse to throttle Gimpy and notes for the first time in his life how he hates someone. Charlie idolizes Mr. Donner and he just can’t imagine why Gimpy would steal from such a good man. And he struggles with what to do about it.
Should he tell Mr. Donner? Will Gimpy loose his job if he tells? He’s angry with Gimpy, but he knows that Gimpy is struggling to support his family, so he doesn’t want Gimpy to loose his job. And we realize that even though Charlie is smarter now, he’s just like us, he still doesn’t know what the right thing to do is in complex moral situations.
He goes to the professors, the lead researchers in the intelligence study, seeking advice. One professor tells him to keep it a secret. It’s none of his business and it will only cause problems to tell. The other professor tells him it’s his duty to his employer to tell because Gimpy is stealing from the business that supports everyone’s livelihood.
Those conflicting opinions don’t help so he tries for a tie-breaking vote by asking Alice, his former adult education teacher that he has a close relationship with. But she refuses to break the tie. She tells him that intelligence does not equal morality. He doesn’t need to look to someone he thinks is smarter than him to tell him what is right or wrong. Part of growing up — and that’s what Charlie is doing now as his innocence fades away. Part of growing up is learning to trust your own instincts about right and wrong. We can’t relate to each other purely by rational facts that make sense in our head. Many times we have to tap into our feelings to find the answer — what makes sense in your gut?
To find out what Charlie does, you have to read the book! But I love how this situation strikes at the universal struggle of being human. What is the right way to treat each other in any given circumstance? Our intelligence doesn’t always work at solving that problem and there aren’t always black and white answers. Our super-powers in intelligence as a species are hollow and self-destructive without love, faith, and empathy to balance it out. And even though Flowers for Algernon is, on its face, a book about the pursuit of intelligence, the experience of reading this book is one of the best exercises in empathy that you will ever have.
OUTRO
Flowers for Algernon will take the average reader about 5 hours to read. That means if you read for at least 30 minutes a day, you should be able to finish this book in about 10 days, which is less than 2 weeks.
You can buy this book anywhere books are sold, but if you want the privilege of simultaneously supporting this podcast and independent bookstores then head over to our website BOOKWORMPOD.COM to make your purchase through our Bookshop affiliate store.
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That’s all for this episode. Thank you for listening. But mostly, thank you for reading. Because of you, we’re one book closer to a better world.