Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
E-book version
Some novels undo us. One such novel is Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes’s classic, first published in 1966. It is tender, tragic, and piercingly human.
It is told through the eyes of Charlie Gordon, a 32-year-old man with an IQ of 68. His uncle has arranged for him to hold a menial job at a bakery so that he will not have to live at the Warren State Home and Training School, a state institution.
Charlie is selected for an experimental operation to enhance his intelligence. What begins as a scientific breakthrough quickly unravels into a profoundly personal tragedy. Charlie’s story unfolds through his progress reports, and as his intellect expands, so does the depth of his awareness. He is now aware of his loneliness, the cruelty of others, and the weight of memory.
At the center of this is Algernon, a white laboratory mouse who undergoes the same procedure. It’s a mouse that Charlie hates initially because the mouse is smarter than he is, but he comes to care deeply for it as the story progresses. Algernon’s early brilliance and eventual decline let Charlie understand the arc of his fate. He knows what is coming and begins to grieve for himself even before his regression begins. Before he declines beyond help, Charlie manages to do a wonderful thing for the research.
So, as Charlie begins to regress, the language slowly re-fracts to how it was at the beginning, thoughts start tumbling, and a gripping kind of terror takes hold. His brilliance, once a source of pride, becomes a burden he can feel slipping away. In its place comes uncontainable, raw rage, and it is entirely justified. There is a moment where he can see what’s being lost, but cannot stop it. The injustice is almost unbearable. He lashes out. He isolates himself. The world, once opened wide to him, begins to close again, and the heartbreak lies not just in the closing but in knowing what it meant to have it open.
Towards the end of the book, I was clutching a box of tissues and found myself pausing often, eyes welling with tears. I needed to pause to reflect and breathe.
Flowers for Algernon is more than just a novel about science or cognition because it’s also a story about what it means to be seen, to be treated with kindness, and to feel love and loss—even in fleeting moments. What it reveals is the fragility of knowing.
The last sentence in the book did it for me. It broke my heart, and I was inconsolable. I will carry it with me for a very long time.
