(Note: contains spoilers)
It’s a hypothetical scenario we’ve all indulged in at least once: what if there was a medical procedure to make you smarter? A scientific breakthrough in neurosurgery makes it possible, and it’s been performed on a white mouse, Algernon, who can find its way through a maze faster than a person can. Charlie Gordon, a young man who’s lived his entire life with an IQ of 68, is offered the chance to undergo this procedure.
Charlie begins writing progress reports after the procedure. From poorly punctuated, pitiful entries talking about “operashuns” and “sientists,” Charlie’s narrative flowers into a series of brilliantly narrated discoveries and realizations about life–as well as alarming experiences with the people whom he thought were friends.
I think Keyes does a brilliant job of tracing the rise and fall of something as complex as intelligence from a first-person perspective. Charlie undergoes the mental, emotional, social, and sexual development of a man’s lifetime in less than a year. With his rise in perception comes strained relationships, arguments, and recalling of long-buried childhood trauma. A hard truth comes out then: people only like Charlie as long as he’s stupid. People like him when they can feel superior, and hate him when he makes them feel inferior. Charlie starts to read articles in multiple languages about neuroscience and psychosurgery, classical literature, economic theories, rapidly expanding his mind and surpassing the doctors who performed the surgery on him. One night, disillusioned with the bitter, opportunistic doctors, Charlie says to them, drunk:
“Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”
But then Algernon starts to act erratic. The mouse deteriorates in mental capacity and eventually starts engaging in self-destructive behavior, giving up and refusing to eat. Charlie tragically starts to follow the same path of relapse, until the final pages of his entries resemble the incoherent entries at the beginning, as foreshadowed by the rise and fall of Algernon’s intelligence. Throughout the process we witness Charlie’s heartbreaking struggle to try and hold on to the things he’s learned, although they begin to elude him one by one.
Yet in the final pages, which resemble the first ones in their poor spelling and logic, we see that they are intermingled with hope (he resolves to keep reading and writing, in hopes of getting a little better, though we know that the only thing awaiting him is more degeneration), gratitude (for his short-lived time as a smart man, and his contribution to the world of science), and even a spark of humor, though maybe unintended (telling his doctor to be less grouchy and then maybe he’ll have more friends). And of course, his final request is for flowers for Algernon’s grave, a touching plea to the world asking them to remember the mouse (and the man, Charlie Gordon) who briefly experienced intelligence and still continues to exist even outside the realm of it.
