Who Is Charlie's Chronicle In Flowers For Algernon

Justin Pham

3/14/23

Period 2, Language Arts

Charlie’s Chronicle

What would you do if you were given the opportunity or chance to increase your knowledge triple the time it is now, but it came at a near cost of death? Would you risk it? For instance, in the story, “Flowers for Algernon,” written by Daniel Keyes. Charlie Gordon is the main character who wants to become intelligent and has experimental brain surgery. After the surgery, Charlie’s rate of intelligence increases drastically after reading more books as he progresses, but he also realizes that his friends are all frauds and they end up distancing themselves away, leaving Charlie all alone. He also falls in love which soon gets seized away due to the peak of his intelligence,

Moreover, we can see this event happening when Charlie insists he’s going to try really hard to get smarter than before when he moves away to New York. Charlie claimed, “I’m taking a cuple books along and even if I cant reed them Ill practise hard and maybe I wont forget every thing I learned. If I try reel hard maybe Ill be a littel bit smarter than I was before the operashun”(Keyes 11). By looking at this evidence, we can acknowledge and understand that Charlie is still motivated to keep learning instead of losing all his motivation after the incident. This shows how stronghearted and benevolent Charlie is. On the contrary, some may think that before the surgery, he was already learning and that the surgery side effects took away some of his IQ. Even though Charlie lost a little bit of his IQ, he can always get back his IQ by learning which he is now more determined than ever to

Therefore, we can see this event happening when Charlie starts to notice how beautiful Miss Kinnian was as he progresses and he starts to fall in love. Charlie praises,“I don’t understand why I never noticed how beautiful Miss Kinnian really is. She has brown eyes and feathery brown hair that comes to the top of her neck…Now, everytime I see her she grows younger and more lovely”(Keyes 6). In this quote, we can see that Charlie has felt love for the first time in his life. Charlie wouldn’t have felt love for the first time if it wasn’t for the surgery since he gained a sense of awareness. Nevertheless, some may say that Charlie had his heart broken later in the story and it made him feel torn apart. Charlie at least had the sensation of love which he had never felt in his life, and it would probably be better to feel love once in your life rather than not having the feeling of it at