Flowers for algernon essay
Flowers for algernon essayOne experiment was done on a mentally retarded person to try to raise
his intelligence. The experiment worked, but after months, he came back to
the state he orginally was at. In the book, Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel
Keyes, this intelligence operation was done, and the patient was Charlie
Gordon. After the operation, Charlie was very bright, but experienced
loneliness, and physcological distress. Charlie was emotionaly upset because
of his flashbacks from childhood, and because his intellegence grew faster
then his emotional intellegence. After his operation, he slowly started getting
flashbacks from different parts of his childhood. In many of them his mother
would go off and start saying, "...He's normal! He's normal! He'll grow up
like other people. Better than others." Charlie had dreams of how his mother
was ashamed of him. His mother always thought her son was normal and
would grow up and be somebody. Charlie's sister also ignored him. To her,
Charlie was dumb and could not do anything. Charlie had dreams of his
sister yelling at him and making fun of him. He also had memories of the
night his parents took him to the Warren Home. He was terrified and his dad
would never answer his questions. Charlie remembered his childhood and
through his memories, he felt guilty for hurting his family.
After the operation, In the bakery, he used to have friends. Friends
that would talk to him and care about him. Charlie then realized that he had
no friends but merely knew people that made fun of him. The bakery
employees just liked him because they could blame their mistakes on Charlie.
Then, they could not do this after the operation, so they all turned against
Charlie. Charlie also found out about Nemur and Strauss, the men who
preformed the operation. He realized they were not professionals, but two
men that were taking a shot in the dark. Charlie felt like an expendable lab
specimen. Thus, Charlie had lost his friends and knew now he was just a like
a lab rat.
He was starting to regress and thought about suicide to end his up and
down life. He became irritable and edgy around people at the university. He
would become mad at people very quickly and then yell at them. People
stayed away from him because he was becoming a madman and was
unpredictable. Because of this, Charlie became lonely in his last weeks before
he regressed totally. Charlie lost his job because he was to smart to work in a
bakery. Although Charlie was a genius he had no real social skills. The
"Charlie" inside of himself emerged and started to regain control of his mind.
All in all, Charlie suffered from the pain of not knowing how to deal with his
peers and decisions. Therefore, after the operation, Charlie became a smart
man but he had to pay the price for it. He had psychological...
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