Flowers For Algernon Answers

Scottie Maher

Hour 1

Flowers for Algernon “How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.” The horrendous treatment of the handicapped is highlighted throughout Flowers for Algernon. Charlie has a revelation as his intelligence increases about how he has been treated in the bakery and is very hurt about what has been happening for his entire life. Before his operation, Charlie believed everyone from the bakery liked him and was his friend. After the operation began and his intelligence started increasing, he realized that this was not at all the case. Charlie further understood that

Nemur referred to Charlie like a thing rather than a human multiple times and Charlie even said that, “He makes me feel that before the experiment I was not really a human being.” When Nemur began the experiment on Charlie, Charlie was an enthusiastic and positive man with a very low IQ. As the experiment began to take effect, Charlie began to become more intelligent. He also became self absorbed, arrogant, and antisocial. This change in Charlie’s intelligence caused Nemur to consider Charlie as more human than he was before the experiment. Since Nemur valued intelligence very greatly, he thought that where there is no intelligence, there is no being. Charlie strongly disagreed with this because he had seen the situation from both perspectives. He knew that he was a person before the experiment. He had feelings and emotions, which in his opinion was a more apt classification of human beings than an intelligence quotient. Charlie suffered mistreatment throughout his life and when he gained intelligence, he was horrified at how the mentally handicapped were

Once his experiment started and his intelligence began increasing he found out that he was constantly teased and made fun of by his fellow employees. This made Charlie feel very ashamed and embarrassed. He soon realized that the mentally handicapped were teased throughout society, and that it was not specific to him. Many people did not consider mentally handicapped people fully human, but rather as things because of their low intelligences. Charlie was very upset about how society treated mentally handicapped people. He tried to change it, but he found himself falling into the same motion as society and treating them badly. He does not understand why someone would be treated badly because they have a low intelligence, even if they are a kind person at heart. The cruel mistreatment of the mentally handicapped throughout the book occurred because of feelings of superiority that the general public had over the mentally handicapped people in society. The way that a mentally handicapped person was treated was not seen as bad, and even if it was, it couldn’t be changed. “Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts the