"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes
Copyright 1966, 311 pages
Realistic Fiction
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| Image taken from Goodreads |
Anyway.
Despite being a beloved classic, I have genuinely never even heard of this title until someone brought it up. I'm drawn to any book that has something to do with psychology, mental illness or depression. Plus, this one has a cute little white mouse. So Flowers it is. I'm glad I picked up this book. I didn't expect much of it when I first started reading, honestly. But as the story goes by, I realize that there's a whole lot of attention to detail from Keyes. I don't know if other people notice, but I definitely notice how all the spelling mistakes Charlie made at the first page he also made on the last page. At the same time, the way Charlie s-l-o-w-l-y climbed up his pyramid of intelligence is the exact same way he climbed down. I love all the subtle changes. So subtle, sometimes I didn't even catch that Charlie has progressed or regressed (again).
I'm not in Special Education. So I can't make too many comments on Charlie's condition and how he's supposed to be educated. But I have been in several Special Ed schools or classrooms. All the crude, hurtful terms used in the book and how everyone - including the honorable scientists in the convention, for goodness sake - treated Charlie as if he's a mindless lab rat made me pull out a comparison chart in my head. Have we improved?
Surely, we don't tolerate calling people with intellectual disability "morons" or "dumb" anymore. But have we treated them differently? Sure, there's Least Restrictive Environment going on. Sure, there's such thing as a Special Education teachers. But have we stopped staring two seconds longer than we should? Have we stopped laughing? Have we stopped demanding them to be someone they're not?
I swear I thought Charlie would discuss whether or not he feels his experiment is moral or "right". But he didn't, and it annoyed me a whole lot. We did see, however, that he developed a brand new research so a better experiment can one day take place. His goal was to "smart-ify" thousands upon thousands of others with intellectual disability. But was that the right thing to do? Do we really need to surgically increase brain function on all these people to the point of ingenuity? Alright, maybe not to the point of an 185 IQ (which is off the charts, by the way, because "genius" is 160+). But the question stands: how moral is it to cut open someone's head and just make them "smart" - because there is no place for challenged people in the world. What about non challenged people, then? Non challenged people with the "average" 100-114 IQ. Do they need surgery too? Because all those thousands upon thousands are geniuses now? How important is intelligence really? How do we know that above average IQ is a good thing anyway? There are three quotients now - IQ, EQ, and SQ. Do we need an off-the-charts score for all three, too?
I think Charlie answered us by showing his short-lived affair with Fay and Alice. It doesn't matter that he has all the knowledge in the world if he doesn't have anyone to love and love him back. But like I said: I swear I thought Charlie would discuss whether or not his experiment was right. I feel like that part of the novel was just evading the hard question - or just the question I'm interested in. There was also this brief discussion about God's existence - which Charlie also artfully evaded. He glossed over it a little bit, but then never brought it up again. It annoyed me. The last page left this itch to know what does Charlie think about all these questions.
But other than that, if it's not yet obvious, I love this book. I always love books that make you think twice, or shows you how does a world look like from someone else's eyes. Someone else whose opinion you never thought to be important until now. Flowers is totally that book.
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