After Charlie undergoes the surgery that is supposed to “cure” him, his writing rapidly becomes more complex and almost hyper-intelligent. Yet that doesn’t stop us from getting a sense of Charlie as a character. His writing isn’t just childish it is painfully under-developed. When the book begins, Charlie cannot spell or form proper sentences. But Moon and Keyes take subtly different approaches to these issues.įlowers for Algernon is entirely narrated by Charlie Gordon through an epistolary device that allows Keyes to chart Charlie’s mental development throughout the story. Both involve the augmentation or enhancement of the brain of someone with a disability and then allow the reader to observe how this affects the protagonist’s outlook on life and the way people in his life change in their treatment of him. Unlike many others, I read The Speed of Dark long before Flowers for Algernon, which is generally the book people compare The Speed of Dark to. On the surface this is a simple book with a straightforward story, but there is so much going on here that it’s well worth studying, in school or independently. This dichotomy is indubitably subjective in my case, I consider Flowers for Algernon a member of the former category. As I continue my odyssey of Reading Things People Read in High School That I, For Some Reason, Did Not Read, I ponder why some classics are obviously classics and others inscrutably so.
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