Charlie's Involutions: A Short Story

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

To begin with, Charlie loses his ignorance/naiveness and is able to make his own judgment of the world and it’s people. “I had reached a new level and anger and suspicion were my first reactions to the world around me.” This quote comes from the early stages of the experiment showing how quickly Charlie’s eyes were opened to the real world. He begins to question his doctors which pre-experiment he referred to as “gods”. Later on in the experiment Charlie realizes how basic the college student conversations are; conversations he onced wished he could be part of, writing “Strange how when I’m in the college cafeteria and hear the students arguing about history or politics or religion… I find no pleasure in discussing ideas on such an elementary level.” This questioning

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.

Charlie experiences drastic changes throughout the story. All of them are mentally due to the experimental operation he had. In the

- In this scene, Charlie knows that his IQ is decreasing because his memories are starting to fade away.

Before the surgery, Charlie was a person that was liked by all. The people in his life knew him from his benevolent smile with a sense of humor. Now, his intelligence seems to have taken over the emotional side to him, and transform it for the worse. For example, the people at the bakery are what Charlie considered as family. As a young child, Charlie’s family life was not adequate. His parents—especially Rose (Charlie’s mother)—wanted to put him into a mental institution. Before the chaos would take place, Charlie’s uncle had taken him in and offered a job, and other necessities. Since Uncle Herman died, Mr. Donner seems to have a reason to let Charlie go, especially since he along with the other coworkers are confused at what is happening to Charlie. For example, “But something happened to you, and I don’t understand what it means. Not only me. Everyone has been talking about it” (Keyes 104). After the surgery, everything seemed to go downhill for Charlie; everything in his life was not the best because of his increase in intelligence. His emotions are taking a toll from his life at the expense of the decision he made. Furthermore, changes cannot always be beneficial. Charlie would have been fine without the procedure because his life was just right. A change in one’s life can because the biggest break in

To begin with, ignorance in certain situations is bliss and sometimes not knowing the whole truth is better than knowing all of it. This is certainly the case for Charlie because in the beginning of the novel Charlie's intelligence is very low and he doesn't understand what is going

Then he goes into a depression because there is absolutely nothing he can do himself to help him regain his knowledge. The doctors didn’t do anything to help him. The only person that helped him was the woman that was hired to take care of him while he was going through his stages of amnesia. The doctors didn’t help Charlie when he was going through his decrease of intelligence even though it was their

Charlie actually knows that he did something important by stating “Anyway I bet I'm the first dumb person in the world who found out something important for science. 245” The fact that he knows he did something important shows that he learned from the experience. Charlie even developed his own theory that helped people in the community. “ARTIFICIALLY-INDUCED INTELLIGENCE DETERIORATES AT A RATE OF TIME DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE QUANTITY OF THE INCREASE 240” If Charlie did not write this theory, the doctors would of kept trying to make him

Charlie realized that because of the way that his brain works, people will never treat him like they would treat a normal processing human being. His so called friends used him for their enjoyment and embarrassed him over and over again. Charlie was finally done with the people that he used to trust and call his friends and moved away because he wanted a fresh start with people that he could trust. “Flowers for Algernon”, “Speckled Band”, and “A Retrieved Reformation” had many lessons and themes to be learned, I thought that trust was the most important lesson because trust is something that everybody needs to learn and

Furthermore, he finds happiness in the smallest pleasures in his daily life. Before his surgery, he lives happily without feeling physical and emotional pain. After the procedure, he finds out that Algernon, a mouse who goes through the same operation as him, starts digressing downhill and his mental ability to be intelligent starts to go away. Charlie is wretched because he knows that this will soon happen to him. Moreover, he has become alienated from all of the people he loves. Charlie recalls that "[he is] alone at Mrs. Flynn's boarding house most of the time I seldom speak to anyone"(___). He has nothing to hold onto, and he even has thoughts of suicide. " Dr. Straus came to see me again... I told him to go away...I am touchy and irritable.

Charlie’s mental and emotional state. Many times in the story one must question his mental state and why he seems to be so sensitive to everything enough to cry. Not to mention at one point he blacks out probably due to the rage he felt at the time of Patrick getting beat up by his ex-boyfriend and his friends (Chbosky pgs. 150-151). It is later shown that Charlie does have PTSD, which is a disorder that develops in some people after a traumatic event in their life. In this case, him being molested by his Aunt as a child and her death on his birthday. As for his emotions they are a roller coaster on their own on page two of the book, he says he is “both happy and sad, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could

Now he values being a better person, as proof clearly states in progress report eleven he says ¨Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined with them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all.¨. This proof clearly shows he values being a better person. Another statement in the story also shows he values being a better person in progress report 10, he says ¨I figured out a new way to line up the machines in the factory, and Mr. Donnegan says it will save him ten thousand dollars a year in labor and increased production.¨ This evidence shows that Charlie just helped another person save ten thousand dollars a year. Now let's look at how Charlie starts to forget things in the last part of the

Throughout the novel Charlie’s personality and intelligence level changes a lot. In the beginning Charlie is happy, has friends, he’s retarded, and can’t remember a lot of things. “I fergot his last name because I dont remebir so good.” (Keyes 2),

This was serious. Charlie was going to die. Charlie researched many ways to prevent his death but he had no luck. All his friends were supportive and continued to treat him the way they did when he was smart. This made Charlie feel a little better about the situation and let him know that he made a little bit of benefit out of it.