It feels strange to say that the highlight of my trip to Dubai was reading ‘Flowers for Algernon’, a science fiction book I found by chance.
It’s one of the most moving books I’ve read.
The story is about Charlie Gordon, an unintelligent man who becomes a genius through an operation until he eventually regresses to his old self. It’s written as a first-person epistolary (it reminds me to Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’), and part of the stylistic arc of the novel is seeing how Charlie’s grammar and voice changes with his intellect.
I found this book exceptional because of Charlie’s psychological journey (it has a clear psychoanalytic influence) and how relatable it is. In this sense it’s similar to a coming of age story with the difference that the protagonist regresses to his child-like status in the end. At every stage of the story — across every different version of Charlie Gordon — there’s something different I could empathize or relate to, and I expect most people would feel the same.
The main theme is that every person deserves dignity and love. Few people — principally his father — accept Charlie for who he is. His mother goes from denying his stupidity — for fear of what others might think of her — to violently rejecting him. Other kids bully and ostracize him. Even when he becomes a genius, the scientist who operated on him describes himself as Charlie’s creator — erasing his previous life as an incapacitated, but still human, thirty year-old. In this sense, it almost reads as a defence of the dignity of animal life — as implied by Charlie’s affection towards Algernon the mice and the times in which it’s anthromorphizised by the author.
A secondary theme — but one I find more captivating — is the tension between intelligence and love. Charlie the moron wants to become smart to make his mother proud and better relate to others, but he’s happy and feels he has friends. As he becomes smarter he’s mortified to discover that most of his friends humiliate and laugh at him. When they start feeling insecure because Charlie becomes smarter than them, they abandon and reject him. Finally, as a genius he becomes “insuffurably rude” — the opposite of the naive, kind Charlie who couldn’t understand his friend’s true motivations.
In one of the climaxes of the book, Charlie’s monologue goes to the crux of the theme:
But I’ve learned that intelligence alone doesn’t mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligent and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn
Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love…Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.
I couldn’t recommend this novel with more enthusiasm, and I hope it’s more widely read.