Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon, a book written by

Daniel Keyes, may sound familiar because you might have read it as a short story some time back. The depth that the novel creates surpasses the short story version in lengths that are indescribable. although he doesn't really tell you the story. The protagonist Charlie Gordon tells you the story through a series of progress reports, or how he put it "progris riports." Charlie leads us through his naively superb life with these progress reports. He tells us about the going-ons at his job, the bakery, where he makes deliveries. Also about his childhood with his mother desperately throwing money left and right to anyone who can make her child normal. It's an understandable endeavor and we learn much more about Charlie's past throughout the book too.

The main plot however is about how Charlie is undergoing an experiment to raise his IQ three-fold. The experiment works, but while Charlie is getting smarter and smarter he is still emotionally a child. There is a lot of inner conflict when Charlie just doesn't know what to do because he is emotionally unprepared for the adult world. The use of dramatic irony in the story is ingenious because even though Charlie overhears things and writes them down in his progress reports he doesn't really know what the things he wrote mean or fully understands them because in one way or another he's mentally inept in being able to comprehend them. We follow him through this, for lack of funner words, emotional roller coaster that is his new life given to him by the operation and genius IQ. Over all I'd recommend it made me read even outside of SSR time!