Flowers For Algernon :: essays research papers

Flowers for Algernon     The main display cases of the story are Charlie, who is a mentally retarded person involved in a remarkable essay which increased his I.Q. Alice, a teacher at the Adult Basic Education Facility at Beekman College who taught Charlie how to read and write, the professors who operated on Charlie. Fay who appeared toward the depot of the book , and last but not least Algernon.     The novel is exciting and has an original idea. The moods That I felt in the story are ones of sorrow, anger, and guilt. In the story, Charlie, is the capable of an experiment which increases his intelligence. Charlie originally wants the operation to look intelligent and get friends. Unfortunately some of his hopes were not met. The main characters in the novel include Charlie, Alice, Algernon, and Fay, a character who did not make much of an appearance, but he thought that he played an important part in Charlie trying to sort out his past( a) and figure out his present and future plans.      Charlie is a mentally retarded person who has impressing people and gaining friends as one of his top priorities. He then hears of an experiment which could possibly make him smart. He makes himself a subject to this human experiment with the hopes of gaining knowledge in a sole purpose of gaining friends. As the book goes on, Charlie goes by dramatic changes mentally, and instead of making him gain friends he actually is looked on in the same way if not worse. For example, at Charlies old work his "friends" do fun of him and enjoyed his company just because Charlie had amused them. Yet after the operation, Charlie finds out that he had not made his friends like him more, but had pushed them away. Charlie understood now what his friends did to him in the past, and starts to look down upon them. Alice, Charlies teacher, is the person who gave Charlie to the idea to give the experiment a chance. She thi nks that Charlie has the determination and will power to make the experiment work. Then, later on in the book, she gets emotionally involved with Charlie and helps Charlie learn more about himself. Algernon, is a lab animal who also had the experiment done on him and as result makes him smarter than the medium mouse. Algernon plays a very important part in the novel because he foreshadows what will happen to Charlie later on in the book.