Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Our usual response to the importance of IQ tests is quite interesting to contemplate. There are people (mostly in educational institutes or organizations) who attach great importance to the IQ scores of individuals. Evidently, the score helps them in selecting candidates as students or employees well-suited for their area of profession/roles/jobs. In the age of facebook and twitter, the importance credited to IQ scores can be best apprehended by the number of people flaunting their scores from some random IQ tests taken online. I wouldn’t shy away from adding here that out of curiosity I too checked my IQ on some random website offering free tests and the result gratified my ego to good extent - pleasures of the mind!!

Since we do attach this kind of importance to the results then this surely means that we have this innate desire to appear or feel smarter/ more intelligent than our peers/friends/family. One way people actually try to do that is by practicing and taking more tests. But what if we can actually achieve the much coveted intelligence in one gulp of a tablet or by some injected chemical? What if we have the desired result at our disposal so much so that we can have an entire line of Einsteins developed in our laboratories?

This is what the novel Flowers for Algernon is about. It is about a mentally slow protagonist Charlie Gordon who is very low on IQ score but has this desire to become smarter so that people may like him more. The desire has its roots in the punishments inflicted upon him in his childhood by his mother who somehow couldn’t come to terms with the state of Charlie’s mind. So when approached by two scientists working in the area towards increasing human intelligence of mentally slower persons, Charlie agrees to be a part of the experiment.

The novel is written in first person narrative in a diary form. Charlie writes daily progress reports for the scientists telling them about his day, about how he feel and what he thinks of things which come to his mind. The changes in Charlie’s writing style, use of vocabulary and the ideas that occupy his mind over the course of experiment clearly exhibit the achievement of desired result as Charlie goes from a score of nearly 70 to almost 200. He learns twenty languages by himself, understands and contemplates upon various research problems and imbibes a whole book by just glossing over the pages. Overtime he realizes, way before the scientists, that the experiment was doomed to be a failure. He then takes upon himself to indulge in the project and do some tests to come to a conclusion. He abducts Algernon, the lab rat employed for the same experiment, and starts with experiments on his own as he fears that he has limited time with that high IQ. Algernon dies during the experiment and Charlie comes to the conclusion that his intelligence would recede faster and would eventually be the same as before or worse.

The end of the story is tragic. Charlie rebounds to his original IQ and has sometimes faint remembrance of things that happened to him in between.

What makes this novel exceptional is the kind of response it evokes, the kind of questions it makes you ask. Charlie, who later on start understanding his position, is pained to see that he is just another animal for experiment like Algernon, that the scientists only treated him as a subject sans any human feelings or emotions, that he wasn’t valued as a human before he became smart. It lets you raise questions upon the whole practice of experimenting upon animals and humans. How ethical is that?

The work also puts to reflection the behavior of normal people even that of family towards mentally slower ones. When Charlie starts recollecting his past memories from childhood and his work at bakery, it breaks his heart to remember how ill he was treated at the hand of his supposed friends at bakery. He remembers how he was sent away from home by his mother who could not bear his presence in the house anymore. Instead of having been cared for more patiently and sensitively, he was punished every time something happened over which he had no control. While Charlie was a child, his mother suffered from anxiety not about the future of Charlie but about how he would be seen in society as if Charlie’s intelligence were to be the sole criterion of the family’s social standing and success. When he grew up and had a younger sister, his mother decided that he must be sent to a hostel (for mentally slower people) as she didn’t want to ruin the happiness of her daughter.

Such people, who are unable to do things like normal people do or are unable to even take care of themselves, when are mistreated by their family then what chance of a decent life do they have? Are they to be abandoned or sent to some hospital or hostel forever? Don’t they deserve empathy and love?

In the work we also observe the mental tussle between Charlie and Charlie i.e. as the Charlie of a very high IQ feels that he is constantly being watched by the Charlie of a borderline IQ. This makes one think whether increasing intelligence by artificial means can have any adverse effect on the personality of the person.

The scientific community has long been working on increasing human intelligence by artificial means and I have no idea if it has been successful so far.

According to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, an AI researcher:
“If there are any simple mutations that would grant a huge intelligence boost, they must have side effects that would make them net evolutionary disadvantages.”

This he calls Algernon’s law where the name is derived from the work itself. In the novel, both Algernon and Charlie suffer due to an artificial boost to their system.

When Algernon dies in the novel, Charlie gives him a proper burial as he fears the scientists might send him to an incinerator otherwise. Before he himself rebounds to his original IQ, Charlie asks for flowers to be put on Algernon’s grave. But for himself he just decides to go to the Warren hostel amidst the people like him and away from the so called intelligent people who may only treat him as a lab animal.



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