Emotional Maturity In Charlie Gordon's 'Flowers For Algernon'

The protagonist and author of the progress reports that form the text of Flowers for Algernon. Charlie is a thirty-two-year-old mentally retarded man who lives in New York City. At the start of the novel, he works at Donner’s Bakery as a janitor and delivery boy. Charlie’s friendliness and eagerness to please, along with his childhood feelings of inadequacy, make him the hardest-working student in Alice Kinnian’s literacy class for retarded adults. When Charlie undergoes an experimental surgery to increase his intelligence, his IQ skyrockets to the level of a genius. His obsession with untangling his own emotional life and his longing to reach an emotional maturity and inner peace to match his intellectual authority inform many of the novel’s

How does the diary or journal-entry form affect the emphasis of the narrative? How dependable is Charlie as a narrator as he progresses through his various stages? Discuss Charlie’s capability of providing insight to the other characters.

The book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, provides an alternative approach to how a person achieves success. This book does not focus on the conventional determinant of success, such as formal education and training, experience, and intelligence level (IQ). Although all these components contribute greatly to ones achievement of success, these factors are not the only factors to be considered in whether a person will be successful or not. This book focuses on the concept that it refers to as emotional intelligence (EQ), which is one’s ability to recognize and effectively understand his/her emotions in a productive and rational manner.

Before the operation, Charlie Gordon, from Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, is happy. He may have a simple, pitiful existence, but he thinks his friends like him, and enjoys being with them and Miss Kinnian at the Learning Center for Slow Adults. However, Charlie wants to be smart, the one dark cloud in his sunny sky of life. Because of this, Charlie volunteers for an operation to triple his IQ of 68. With a high IQ comes awareness of the world around him, so Charlie suddenly becomes conscious of his previously pitiful existence which leads to a slew of feelings such as embarrassment, shame, and superiority. Charlie thinks that becoming smart will make him happy and well-liked, but the operation works the opposite effect. Charlie starts to look down on everyone, and cannot socialize with others because of his IQ. As a result, Charlie becomes almost depressed. His depression deepens when Charlie discovers that his intelligence will not be permanent. Soon, Charlie regresses to his former childlike mentality. Although at the end of the novel, Charlie does not find himself any worse off after the operation, the few months he spent smarter are not terribly enjoyable for him, and his changing mentality negatively impacts those he is close to, namely Miss Kinnian. Because the effects are not permanent, Charlie would be far better off without the operation.

The author uses communication style as a method of character development, which the author utilized to build Charlie Gordon’s character. Throughout the book, Charlie’s communication changes from when his IQ is merely 68 to when the surgical procedure raises his IQ to 125. Initially, his grammar is full of errors and simple vocabulary but later improved drastically, after the procedure, by use of complex wordings (Allan 31). The communication style is different between the two phases especially through differentiated personalities and speech between two periods. Daniel Keyes also endeavors to capture the character’s history to enable the audience to understand the events that shape Charlie’s personality.

This entire book highlights both the high and low points in Charlie’s life, and how he changed and has not changed all from his constant value of friendship to his many realizations, based on the one experimental surgery that gave him insight on what life would be like if he was “normal”.

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” - Harriet Tubman. Charlie Gordon is a very welcoming, playful, and genuine man. He attends Beekman College for Retarded Adults and has a strong motivation to learn and to improve his intelligence. He dreams of being popular, and making friends. Throughout the novel Flowers for Algernon, Charlie Gordon changed in many ways. Prior to his life changing operation, he was not able to grasp that the people at Donner’s Bakery were not his friends, they only spoke to him to make fun of him. Charlie acknowledged their harsh actions, and started retaliating. Charlie is a very open

Flowers for Algernon is about a man named Charlie who is mentally slow and not smart. Charlie had an operation to make him smart. What the doctors did was unethical.

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.

The award-winning short science fiction, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, digs deep in how society reacts to different levels of intelligence. The book covers a wide variety of society from the creative minds to world-renowned scientists. When a retarded adult becomes one of those brain maniacs through a scientific operation, you get the full spectrum of what it is like personally as a handicapped person and through the minds of a genius. In the reports, you can see the progress and comparison of Charlie’s realization towards other people’s capability of intelligence.

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

There were many differences and similarities between the short story, “Flowers for Algernon” and the movie, “Charlie”. A huge similarity was that in both Charlie had an operation done on him that would make him smart. He also lost his intelligence in both. One of the first major differences was that in the short story Charlie worked in a plastic box factory and in the movie he worked in some type of bread factory. This changed the way his ‘friends’ would prank him and how he would show his intelligence at work.

Emotional intelligence refers to capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationship. (Goleman, 1995)

…good old street smarts-knowing when to share sensitive information with colleagues, laugh at the boss’s jokes, or speak up in a meeting. In more scientific terms, … [emotional intelligence] can be defined as an array of noncognitive skills, capabilities, and competencies that influence a person’s ability to cope with environmental demands and pressures.1

Emotional intelligence has to do with an individual’s ability to understand and manage his or her own or others’ feelings and emotions. It involves the ability to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in thought, understand and reason about emotion and manage emotions in oneself and in others. People with emotional intelligence are able to identify and recognize the meaning of emotions and to manage and regulate their emotions as a basis for problem solving, reasoning, thinking, and action.