A Man and his Mouse

It seems that it is nearly impossible to please our society and the people in our lives, and the character Charlie Gordon helps prove this. In “Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes, the main character Charlie Gordon undergoes an experiment that will hopefully raise his exceptionally low IQ, an experiment that was first performed successfully on a mouse named Algernon. He participates in this experiment because he wants to be like everyone else and fit in — a thing he has never able to do. Before the experiment, he was too mentally disabled and people would only laugh at him. However, the experiment doesn’t just make him smart, but super-smart, and because of that he is still unable to relate to people. No matter what Charlie Gordon tries to do to please people, he is always a victim of social discrimination, because people never accept him for who he really is.

People don’t accept Charlie when he is mentally challenged because he doesn’t understand very much. When he is little, kids treat him really meanly and not respectfully. At one point he wants to give a valentine to a girl named Harriet, so he asks his friend Hymie to write it, since he can’t write well. Instead of writing what Charlie asks him to, Hymie writes something very dirty, and when Harriet’s older brother sees the note, he gets mad and beats up Charlie in front of the whole school. (53) So even his so-called friends are mean to him. Decades later, after Charlie’s father dies, his father’s best friend gives Charlie a job at his bakery. His co-workers at the bakery always laugh at him, though, because they think he’s stupid, but he thinks they’re laughing with him instead of at him, so he just laughs too. One time a man named Oliver quits his job of mixing dough. So, a man named Joe Carp, who was his “friend,” said: “Charlie why dont you take over Olivers job. Everyone on the floor came around and they were laughing.” (34) They all think he is going to screw up, but he doesn’t because he had watched Oliver do his job for several years, and after he mixes it right, no one laughs. People always expect that he can’t do anything because he is “stupid,” and think that Charlie is just a toy that can be played with. They think he doesn’t feel anything because he doesn’t know anything. But he does have feelings; he just doesn’t know how to express them and tell people when he thinks they should stop.

People also don’t accept Charlie when he is super-intelligent, because he understands far too much to relate to people. After the surgery, when Charlie becomes one of the smartest people in the world, he still can’t fit in. For example, when Professor Nemur (one of the main scientists in charge of Charlie and his surgery) is happily sharing his research about Charlie with other professors, Charlie refutes what he says and makes him feel bad. Charlie doesn’t understand what he does wrong, just like he never understood what he did wrong when he was mentally challenged. So he goes to ask Professor Strauss (the other scientist in charge of Charlie) about what he did, and Strauss says: “You’re making him feel inferior and he can’t take it.” (149) Even the girl he likes who likes him back won’t be with him, because she feels like even though he is very smart, he is still challenged in the emotional way. She wants him to be able to relate to him, but he can’t. When Charlie starts to tell her that he loves her a lot and asks what she thinks about him, she says:

“Charlie, don’t push me. I don’t know. Already, you’ve gone beyond my intellectual reach. In a few months or even weeks, you’ll be a different person. When you mature intellectually, we may not be able to communicate. When you mature emotionally, you may not even want me.” (92)

Being too smart is just as bad as not being smart enough. People can’t relate to him because he has trouble relating to other people. He tries so hard not to be the person he once was and to be something better, but he still has issues similar to the issues he had before, and therefore he is still pretty much stuck in a hole. He was able to get out of his old one, but fell almost immediately into a new hole.

Even Charlie himself doesn’t accept himself. The more he becomes aware of his intelligence, and then starts losing it again, the more unsatisfied he is with himself. An example of this is with his own research. In an article he writes, he puts Algernon’s name first in the title: “The Algernon-Gordon Effect.” This is basically saying that Algernon is more important than Charlie himself, and that Charlie is no different from an animal like Algernon. This is how lots of other people feel, like he is just an experiment and not a human being. It happens so much that he starts accepting that it is true and that he is no more than a lab rat, literally. At first he tries to fight it, but Charlie realizes that no matter what he does, he can never please the people in his life and therefore never please himself. He even thinks about what he truly is while he is doing his research. He wonders:

“Am I a genius? I don’t think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I’m exceptional – a democratic term used to avoid the damaging labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.” (153)

It seems true that people are always trying to label one another, and especially label Charlie. All his life people have had issues with him. Either he is too stupid to understand what they are saying, or he is too smart and overthinks what people are saying.

It seems that in both cases of him being too smart and not smart enough, his problems have to do with emotions. Either he doesn’t understand how to express emotions and act on them (when he is mentally challenged) or he has trouble understanding when he has gone too far and distorted what someone was trying to say or feel into what he wants it to be. But it’s not necessarily his fault. He tries so hard to please the people in his life, but they always find something wrong with Charlie and make it seem so large that he starts to believe it himself. It even starts to drive him crazy. By the end of the book, it seems that his only friend is Algernon, and by then, he feels like he’s even less important than the mouse. It’s not just Charlie Gordon who gets mistreated and is a victim of social discrimination, but lots of other people all around the world are disrespected because they’re not the “perfect human being”. But is there a perfect human being? Or is everyone always going to be insulted because of their flaws? Charlie’s flaws are that he can’t relate to other people because of his intelligence, and people insult him far past his breaking point. Hopefully this doesn’t happen all around the world too, but sadly, we know it does.