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Flowers for Algernon Mass Market Paperback – June 14, 2004
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Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.
As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?
- Print length311 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarcourt
- Publication dateJune 14, 2004
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions6.88 x 4.19 x 0.75 inches
- ISBN-10015603008X
- ISBN-13978-0156030083
- Lexile measure910L
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
"A tale that is convincing, suspenseful and touching."--The New York Times
"An ingeniously touching story . . . Moving . . . Intensely real."--The Baltimore Sun
From the Back Cover
As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?
WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD AND THE NEBULA AWARD
The classic novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning movie Charly
Daniel Keyes, the author of eight books, was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Brooklyn College. Professor emeritus at Ohio University, he lives in Boca Raton, Florida.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they can use me. I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says mabye they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon I werk in Donners bakery where Mr Donner gives me 11 dollers a week and bred or cake if I want. I am 32 yeres old and next munth is my brithday. I tolld dr Strauss and perfesser Nemur I cant rite good but he says it dont matter he says I shud rite just like I talk and like I rite compushishens in Miss Kinnians class at the beekmin collidge center for retarted adults where I go to lern 3 times a week on my time off. Dr. Strauss says to rite a lot evrything I think and evrything that happins to me but I cant think anymor because I have nothing to rite so I will close for today...yrs truly Charlie Gordon.
progris riport 2-martch 4
I had a test today. I think I faled it and I think mabye now they wont use me. What happind is I went to Prof Nemurs office on my lunch time like they said and his secertery took me to a place that said psych dept on the door with a long hall and alot of littel rooms with onley a desk and chares. And a nice man was in one of the rooms and he had some wite cards with ink spilld all over them. He sed sit down Charlie and make yourself cunfortible and rilax. He had a wite coat like a docter but I dont think he was no docter because he dint tell me to opin my mouth and say ah. All he had was those wite cards. His name is Burt. I fergot his last name because I dont remembir so good.
I dint know what he was gonna do and I was holding on tite to the chair like sometimes when I go to a dentist onley Burt aint no dentist neither but he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert.
So Burt sed Charlie what do you see on this card. I saw the spilld ink and I was very skared even tho I got my rabits foot in my pockit because when I was a kid I always faled tests in school and I spilld ink to.
I tolld Burt I saw ink spilld on a wite card. Burt said yes and he smild and that maid me feel good. He kept terning all the cards and I tolld him somebody spilld ink on all of them red and black. I thot that was a easy test but when I got up to go Burt stoppd me and said now sit down Charlie we are not thru yet. Theres more we got to do with these cards. I dint understand about it but I remembir Dr Strauss said do anything the testor telld me even if it dont make no sense because thats testing.
I dont remembir so good what Burt said but I remembir he wantid me to say what was in the ink. I dint see nothing in the ink but Burt sed there was picturs there. I coudnt see no picturs. I reely tryed to see. I holded the card up close and then far away. Then I said if I had my eye glassis I coud probaly see better I usully only ware my eyeglassis in the movies or to watch TV but I sed maybe they will help me see the picturs in the ink. I put them on and I said now let me see the card agan I bet I find it now.
I tryed hard but I still coudnt find the picturs I only saw the ink. I tolld Burt mabey I need new glassis. He rote somthing down on a paper and I got skared of faling the test. So I tolld him it was a very nice pictur of ink with pritty points all around the eges but he shaked his head so that wasnt it neither. I asked him if other pepul saw things in the ink and he sed yes they imagen picturs in the inkblot. He tolld me the ink on the card was calld inkblot.
Burt is very nice and he talks slow like Miss Kinnian dose in her class where I go to lern reeding for slow adults. He explaned me it was a raw shok test. He sed pepul see things in the ink. I said show me where. He dint show me he just kept saying think imagen theres something on the card. I tolld him I imaggen a inkblot. He shaked his head so that wasnt rite eather. He said what does it remind you of pretend its something. I closd my eyes for a long time to pretend and then I said I pretend a bottel of ink spilld all over a wite card. And thats when the point on his pencel broke and then we got up and went out.
I dont think I passd the raw shok test.
3d progris riport
martch 5-Dr Strauss and prof Nemur say it dont matter about the ink on the cards. I tolld them I dint spill the ink on them and I coudnt see anything in the ink. They said maybe they will still use me. I tolld Dr Strauss that Miss Kinnian never gave me tests like that only riting and reeding. He said Miss Kinnian tolld him I was her bestist pupil in the Beekman School for retarted adults and I tryed the hardist becaus I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me.
Dr Strauss askd me how come you went to the Beekman School all by yourself Charlie. How did you find out about it. I said I dont remembir.
Prof Nemur said but why did you want to lern to reed and spell in the frist place. I tolld him because all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb and my mom always tolld me to try and lern just like Miss Kinnian tells me but its very hard to be smart and even when I lern something in Miss Kinnians class at the school I ferget alot.
Dr Strauss rote some things on a peice of paper and prof Nemur talkd to me very sereus. He said you know Charlie we are not shure how this experamint will werk on pepul because we onley tried it up to now on animils. I said thats what Miss Kinnian tolld me but I dont even care if it herts or anything because Im strong and I will werk hard.
I want to get smart if they will let me. They said they got to get permissen from my familie but my uncle Herman who use to take care of me is ded and I dont rimember about my familie. I dint see my mother or father or my littel sister Norma for a long long long time. Mabye their ded to. Dr. Strauss askd me where they use to live. I think in brooklin. He sed they will see if mabye they can find them.
I hope I dont have to rite to much of these progris riports because it takes along time and I get to sleep very late and Im tired at werk in the morning. Gimpy hollered at me because I droppd a tray full of rolles I was carrying over to the oven. They got derty and he had to wipe them off before he put them in to bake. Gimpy hollers at me all the time when I do something rong, but he reely likes me because hes my frend. Boy if I get smart wont he be serprised.
Copyright © 1966, 1959 by Daniel Keyes
Copyright renewed 1994, 1987 by Daniel Keyes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part
of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Product details
- Publisher : Harcourt; First Edition (June 14, 2004)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 311 pages
- ISBN-10 : 015603008X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156030083
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Lexile measure : 910L
- Item Weight : 6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.88 x 4.19 x 0.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #172,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,564 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #4,816 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #10,387 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the authors
Daniel Keyes (1927 - 2014) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Brooklyn College. He was the author of eight books, including the classic Flowers for Algernon, first published in 1966, which would go on to sell more than five million copies and inspire the film Charly. He also worked as a merchant seaman, fiction editor, high school teacher, and university professor, and won the Hugo and Nebula awards for his work.
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Although the story went through various forms (short story, teleplay, novel, film), I consider the novel to be the definitive version of this profound and heartbreaking story. Charlie is chronologically in his early thirties but his mental age is probably seven or eight. He was taken to a special home for mentally handicapped children and then offered a job at a bakery with a cheap apartment nearby from a kind man named Mr. Donner. He mostly does custodial jobs at the bakery and, even though he realizes that his co-workers play practical jokes on him, he considers them his friends because they are all laughing at him. The key word here is “laughing.” As long as he laughs with them, he feels appreciated.
Charlie takes remedial writing classes at a center for adults with special needs taught by Miss Alice Kinnian. Miss Kinnian is beautiful, kind, and patient with Charlie so it is easy to see how Charlie can develop a “crush” on her. Through her he learns about the testing being done by Professor Nemur at the college. He immediately begins maze “racing” with Algernon, a little white mouse that has been injected with an experimental drug that is designed to improve mental capacity. They are interested in testing it out on a human and want to know if Charlie is interested. They know there are some risks of it not working and ask him if he is still interested in the surgical procedure. It doesn’t take long for simple-minded Charlie to want to get smarter, even if he is just able to beat Algernon in the maze race.
After the operation there are not immediate results but Charlie is beginning to grow impatient about going through the same exercises, racing Algernon, until he beats him. That thrill wears off as his writing and reading begin to improve. His rapidly increased mental abilities soon surpass even the teachers and the testers. He felt isolated and lonely before, when he didn’t understand that his “friends” at the bakery where he worked were playing jokes on him. They laughed and he laughed with them and accepted their laughter as friendship. When his intelligence increases, he notices one of his co-workers undercharging a customer and pocketing the extra change as a tip. The winks exchanged between the co-worker and the customer indicate that they’re both in on the scam. Charlie is now faced with a moral dilemma.
After not getting a satisfactory answer for how to handle the problem, Charlie brings it up with the co-worker, wanting advice for a “friend” who has seen his co-worker stealing from the boss. The co-worker says that his “friend” should mind his own business. This confrontation plants a barrier between Charlie and his co-workers, who start a petition to have Charlie fired.
Charlie suddenly has an extreme mismatch between his accelerating intelligence and extremely erratic emotions. He knows he’s in love with Alice Kinnian but he can’t express himself without making her uncomfortable. Every time he tries to express himself sexually, the negative association with sexual expression whenever Charlie’s mother scolded him—incontinence and nausea—will emerge as a ‘fail-safe’ behavioral intervention.
As Charlie’s intelligence grows exponentially, he feels isolated from others because he has outstripped everyone around him and can’t carry on an intellectual conversation with anyone on his own level—no one is on his level.
He meets a new neighbor, an uninhibited and sexually aggressive artist named Fay Lillman. She sees the three-dimensional maze Charlie has built for Algernon (Charlie ‘kidnapped’ Algernon) and sees it as a piece of ‘living’ art. Charlie can’t communicate on an intellectual level with her but he can express himself sexually with her and bypass “Charlie’s” behavioral panic device by seeing it as purely physical. He is not in love with Fay as he is with Alice.
He has now observed enough of the behavior of Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss to realize that they don’t see him as a human but as their most successful experiment. Nemur, in particular, dismisses any objections that Charlie puts forth and sees this experiment as a way to enhance his own reputation.
When Algernon begins to slow down and not run the maze as fast and actually begins the self-destructive behavior of flinging himself against the walls of the cage, Charlie understands that there is a flaw in the experiment that, if it makes Algernon regress, will probably affect him as well.
For a while, Charlie is at a peak of mental and physical energy:
‘It’s as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I’ve found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon—very soon—it will burst into consciousness. Let me solve this one problem. I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had.’
Charlie has used his phenomenal brain power while he has it to formulate the “Algernon-Gordon Effect,’ diagnosing the flaw in the experiment and stating, theoretically, what will ultimately happen to Algernon and himself.
After Charlie has given his ‘Algernon-Gordon Effect’ thesis to Nemur and Strauss and vowed that he won’t return for any more testing, he returns and finds Alice asleep on his couch. After her admission that she is coming to him now that they might both be on the same level, emotionally, they make love and Charlie realizes that they are both entwined in a spiritual/physical embrace. They both know that they can only be together for a short time. She has agreed to leave when he tells her the time has come. That time is approximately a week later. His ability to read and comprehend deteriorates and his irritability at her attempts to tidy up his apartment and drop useful books in obvious places for him to find lead him to resent her presence there. She packs up and leaves.
If there is any consolation in Charlie’s retrograde intelligence, it is the lack of ability to grieve in advance for all the beautiful things that will be lost. The Charlie that has returned with an IQ of 68 may be less intelligent but he feels unfiltered gratitude, no longer tethered to inductive reasoning or a hyperawareness of tragedy:
‘If you ever reed this Miss Kinnian dont be sorry for me. Im glad I got a second chanse in life like you said to be smart because I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this werld and Im grateful I saw it all even for a littel bit…Anyway I bet Im the frist dumb persen in the world who found out some thing importent for sience. I did something but I don’t remember what. So I gess its like I did it for all the dumb pepul like me…’
Here are a few takeaway gems:
We are all retarded. The average I.Q. worldwide is approximately 100. That is not too bright. Yet the average person is confident that he is making sound decisions as he eats processed food and putrid meat, while barely exercising. His attention span is pitiful and he fills his brain by passively scrolling on his smartphone (what an ironic name for our phones) or by watching many muscular men throwing funny shaped balls or punching other men. To break the monotony of watching sports, he watches the same repetitive movie plot over and over again as the hero kills forty Yakuza or Russian gangsters in fifteen seconds. When the action movies get boring he watches handsome and pretty actors imitating the lives of others because he doesn't dare to live his own. The average Joe is very likely prone to poverty, depression, ignorance, STD's, and bad health. I doubt most people even floss, or know how to wipe their butts properly. Yet when it comes to voting for POTUS, most people are positive they are making the right decision while screaming at the idiots who vote for the other party. Meanwhile the average American has a reading level of a 7th or 8th grader!
Like Charlie, we are all born as cute morons who stare at the world in dull astonishment (i.e. stupidly) as we are amazed by the mobile toy above our cribs, supposedly for our cognitive stimulation. We then progress as we are amused by wind-up barking dogs and plastic dolls as we progress to concepts of religion and faith in government and authority. Then we are entertained by fantastical fireworks and Disneyland. For those with a higher I.Q. (Charlie with an I.Q. of 280) who easily see through the smoke-profits of Disney, we stare at the stars and fathom multi-universes. Little do we realize that even if we had the intelligence and power of God, we would still get bored and find ourselves creating more worlds.
All of us, rich and highly intelligent or poor and dumb (feel free to mix and match), run like mice for cheese (money, fame, pu**y, glory, eternal life). And whether the cheese is a five-star dinner or a Big Mac "happy meal," we eat, shit, piss, and ejaculate like animals. Some of us believe we're sophisticated because we wear expensive clothing, jewelry, and Rolex watches, while speaking six languages as we jet around the world. But we've never really passed the stage of hunter/gatherers who will do anything for a paycheck, or to impress a female to mate with. We are not as complicated or as dramatic as we believe we are. We race through a cage called "existence," and the faster we run the sooner we arrive nowhere.
Even if we were able to travel a thousand light years to some distant earthlike planet we would have barely moved. We would not even have walked across our lawn-universe to visit our next door neighbor. The entire universe is just one gigantic maze-cage. And, like Algernon and Charlie, we are all mice. And too many of us are rats.
We all travel through a maze called "life" in the belief that we have free will and are making wise decisions, as we hurry to an imaginary "have it all" finish line for eternal cheese, when in reality we are just bumping into situations that force us to turn right or left as we race to our graves. And no matter how many hats we wear, or how fast we run to conquer the cheese-world, or to add more digits of monopoly money into our savings account, we will all wind up on a gurney, and eventually as fertilizer and ultimately as elements in space.
If we live long enough we will all regress like Charlie as we, once again, shit ourselves and try to remember things that we so easily grasped just the day before. Like Charlie, we were born with empty minds and we become "wise," as we became conditioned by the society in which we live. We grew up thinking that our ideas and beliefs are our own, when in reality we just mimicked the generation that birthed us, as we in turn give birth to the next generation of racing mice, who will mimic us, as they worship Allah, God, Buddha, or Jesus, depending on how their ancient predecessors were forced to believe, by their ancient "wise" men/wise-guy "leaders" (who constantly took their cheese - and all too often, their lives). The more fortunate among us believe we are more educated and tolerant, when in reality we are merely sheep who quickly follow the falsely super-confident "leader" (who is polling our every fantasy of how we want them to lead us). Then, no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, it all dissipates as we age. As they say in Jamaica, "Once an adult; twice a child."
What I love about this book is that, like Charlie, we all start out as simpletons. As children we observe, but barely understand, as we marvel the new world around us and wonder at it all, as we are easily amused by the barking toy dog or plastic doll I mentioned earlier. We grow up with false beliefs in our government, parents, religious leaders, educators, and politicians. As we age, we realize that we trusted fools. We then think that we now see things clearly when, in reality, we are duped idiots as we stare at more sophisticated toys called "precious" diamonds and castles, or silicone infused breasts, while jealously admiring someone else's wife or their fifteen minutes of fame. It's all an illusion. We still remain as childish as Charlie in his imbecilic state of mind. For those of us who finally mature and grow old, we realize that no one really knows anything. Even scientists have barely dented the surface by the depth of one atom compared to how much they don't know. As we further age, we then lose our memories and experiences, our accumulated knowledge, our wealth, our minds, and eventually our lives. It is so touching when Charlie becomes a child again. It is almost as if he was lobotomized and he then leads a calm and simple existence once again where he barely remembers that he did something important. The question is, "Did he really?" We are saddened by the fact that Charlie is "back where he started from." In a way, Charlie is happy. We are sad that he is happy. Because we still believe that Charlie was disqualified from the race of running through the maze of life. In truth, if we understood that we've been given a low I.Q. (whether it's 90 or 180) for a short while (70 to 80 years) we would perhaps also stop running like Charlie did (in his genius mode) as he searched for a solution to his problems of curing feeble minds.
Sadly, what Charlie never understood, even in his genius stage, is that we will forever remain caged in a maze as long as we believe we are not in one. Very few of us are destined to escape the maze. The only way out is by stopping the search for the exit.
Top reviews from other countries
This book really is heartbreaking, but was also eye-opening for me in the most profound way. I highly recommend this book, even to those not even remotely interested in science fiction as this element is very light in the story. It's 'human' in a way that I have come to love in every book or film that has this focus on relationships between people. To boot, the cover and astonishing yellow look great on any book shelf.