Change In Daniel Keys's Flowers For Algernon

Before Charlie had the operation preformed on him, he had friends at the bakery he worked at. They were not really his friends because

Charlie’s friends even take advantage of how nice he is. They always make him the root of their jokes. When Charlie asks a barber shop owner to move his illegally parked car, the owner laughs at him and just throws him the keys to the car and tells him to move it himself. The whole town takes advantage of Charlie though, not only his friends. In the supermarket a woman asks to cut in front of him inline and then ends up having a cart full of groceries. This is Charlies breaking point. He starts tensing up, you can tell something is happening. All of a sudden he starts talking in a different voice, and finds vagaclean in the woman’s cart that cut in front of him. So to take his anger out on her he gets on the store microphone and announces she has vagaclean in her cart. We learn this new personalities name when he is drowning a young girl in the water fountain who disobeyed him earlier. When the girl says she is going to tell her father on him, he announces that he is Hank. After this change in personality he starts going

Charlie was a man that did not know how to stand up for himself. He allowed his peers to bully him, and treat him like he is worthless. Charlie thinks that if he allows people to laugh at him, and tease him, they will become his friend. He thinks “Its easy to make frends if you let

Before the enhancing surgery, Charlie Gordon seemed to have depend and trust others, while those people didn’t have his back. This could be a problem in the future, because people have to learn to be independent so when they lose someone important, they don’t crack under pressure. In the story, Keyes writes, “Sometimes somebody will say hey look at Joe or Frank or George he really pulled a Charlie Gordon. I dont know why they say that but they always laft” (Keyes, 289). Daniel Keyes uses dramatic irony as a way of displaying Charlies perception of his friends. Charlie assumes he has very nice friends, but the audience knows that his

At the beginning, Charlie is without friends and is rather alone. He is very gifted and quite an overthinker which expels him from the usual teenage social groups. This changes, however, when he meets Sam and Patrick at a football game. They expose him to all new experiences. Resulting from his new friendships, is his relationship with Mary Elizabeth, his experimentations with drugs, and new knowledge of being a person. During this time, he is increasingly happy because Charlie was finally living.

We get to know Charlie through letters he writes to the unnamed “friend”. Charlie has a lot of internal conflicts which he deals with every second of his life. He deals with his best friend’s death and his aunt’s death and his past with his aunt. These internal conflicts make him withdrawn. Moreover, Charlie has a need to tell someone about his life and thoughts, maybe to feel less lonely. In the very start of the story Charlie expresses: “I don’t want you to find me”, which emphasizes that he does not want a concrete person to help him, he only needs to let his thoughts out. Charlie is absolutely a dynamic and round character. He is an intelligent, observant high school freshman who hides his beautiful personality because of having dealt with a lot of trauma in his childhood. Through the relationships he develops over the course of the school year, Charlie suddenly comes out of his shell and grows as a person. For example, what he tells Sam who has also dealt with a troubled past: “Even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there”. However, it is not until the very end of the book that he uncovers the repressed memories of sexual abuse of his aunt that are at the foundation of his internal

When Charlie was intelligent he often got irritated at the doctors because they weren’t as smart as him. He had also dealt with a lot of emotion with Miss Kinnian, Charlie was in love with Miss Kinnian. When he regressed, he was embarrassed to see her because he thought she would think he was dumb. When Charlie was at a diner, he saw a kid with disabilities, and everyone was laughing at him and so was Charlie. He was upset with himself that he laughed at him because that kid was him before he had the surgery to make him smart.

Before the surgery Charlie's “friends” could laugh at him without him even realizing it. “Joe Carp said I should show the girls how I mop out the toilet in the factory and he got me a mop.” (Keyes 290). This quote shows his “friends” being able to make fun of him without him even realizing it. After the surgery he learned his “friends” where not really his friends.

His mother had taught him to not look at girls, and after the operation when he started to develop more feelings, he had a hard time talking to Alice Kinnian because he had the thought that he liked her, and that he shouldn’t. Due to the hard nature of his mother, Charlie’s emotional life was not maturing with his new-found intelligence. Emotionally, he was still a little kid. “I knew she would give herself to me, and I wanted her, but what about Charlie?” Whenever he would get near Alice, he would start to panic because he felt that there was still a part of his old self within him, keeping him from taking his relationship further with

For Charlie, he is a dynamic character, meaning he changes significantly throughout the story. After his operation, his views on a lot of things change. One of the things he realizes is “I never knew that Joe and Frank and the others liked to have me around all the time to make fun of me” (Keyes 44). Before his IQ went up, he thought they were laughing with him, not at him. However, for Cinder, things are different.

After his knowledge starts increasing thanks to the operation, Charlie started realizing that what he thought were jokes from his partners, was actually them bullying him. They even make a petition in which they all signed to get Charlie fired from his job. A while later, after he starts losing all his knowledge, he comes back to his job and noticed that people were starting to treat him nicely and that they are protecting him from other bullies. Someone immediately starts bothering Charlie, but then one of his old “friends” came over and took care of him. Charlie wrote, “I said thanks Frank

He doesn't have much spelling mistakes as he used to and is starting to learn more advanced techniques in writing such as commas. In fact, on Charlie's progress report, Ms. Kinnan states " Charlie, you're learning fast." In addition, Ms. Kinnian looked at Charlie in an unusual way. From this, I can infer that Ms. Kinnian is surprised by the rapid growth rate of Charlie's intelligence and is scared of him. According to Dr. Nemur and Dr. Strauss, Charlie's I.Q. which used to be 68 will soon reach over 200. Since he was getting smarter, he came up with a new way to line up the machines in the factory, which will save ten thousand dollars a year in labor and increased production. Now, his co-workers started to avoid Charlie because of his successfulness. It even says on page 9 that his co-workers had to buy some things for their wives as an excuse trying to avoid

Secondly, Charlie’s relationship with people like Gimpy, Joe, Frank, etc. are becoming strained throughout the story. In the beginning of the story, Charlie states that he always looks forward to working in the bakery and seeing his friends Gimpy, Joe and Frank. “Their my frends and they really like me.”, Charlie declares in the story that when he came back from the

He had the operation and it would not be permanent, it will make people not expect him to be the Charlie he was, and he then had no friends, or jobs, and he put his life in danger. Will Charlie ever change his mine? . I think that it's hard to do things, or pick something that may be a dream at first, and then have it become something that wasnt expecting. When Charlie thought that the operation was going to make him smarter, it turned out that everything he cared about, or was close to him,all slipped through his

In Daniel Keyes’ compelling novel, Flowers for Algernon, the main character undergoes both important emotional and physical changes. The book has an interesting twist, as it is described in the characters “progress reports”. This book has a science fiction undertone, and takes place in exciting New York City. As the novel begins, the main character, Charlie Jordan is thirty-two years old, but cannot remember anything from his childhood.