85. Count Your Blessings

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If you are reading this post and find it worthy of attention, you are one of the millions of fortunate people who are doing well in life for reasons that you are well aware of, or that you mostly ignore. But wait, that's not the point: the important fact is that you do find it interesting enough to go on reading and that, when you get to the end of it, chances are you will also glimpse the message in between the lines.

 By now everybody who finished reading the whole short-story text should be able to give right answers to questions ‘hidden’ in the text below, highlighted in italics. They will represent the basis for the comprehension test on Flowers for Algernon, and as many reasons for debate.

  1. Charlie’s age at the beginning of the story was important when he was accepted at the special school for adults. There was something absolutely peculiar about Charlie’s desire to get smart, which made him a candidate for scientific experiments. But becoming smart is not a miracle taking place form morning till night. What is more, the idea of intelligence can hardly be reduced to what his IQ may represent: by extension, intelligence can and does manifest through all the facets of Charlie’s development, from academic performance to full enjoyment of his nature – body, soul and spirit.

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   2.  It is through writing that Charlie’s progress is observed and measured. Never has this technique been applied so systematically and successfully as in Flowers for Algernon. How can someone prove that he/she has made progress but through demonstrating that studying has been assimilated into memory, and that what was ignored is now known – therefore learned? 

  3. Learning through reading, learning from books [what on earth happened to reading – I wonder – for it to stop being a means of ‘getting smart’?!]. It’s not by chance that the first hard book Charlie reads is an adventure book speaking about civilization.

  4. Charlie’s coming into being occurs both for him and for those with whom he comes into contact. There’s Donner (Donnegan in the film) and the team of peevish, down-to-earth workers, with their petty thefts and smart-Alec attitude; there’s Fay (in the audio), who helps Charlie discover that there’s pleasure in the union of a man and a woman – everything his mother had punished him for. And – of course – there’s Alice, the love of his life.

  5.  At the Scientists’ Convention, Charlie forecasts a grim outcome for the future of humanity. Perhaps his speech was too short for such an important scenario in which upgrading people’s minds would take place thanks to research.

  6.  At the peak of his cognitive abilities, Charlie launches his own theorem, which would explain why he will soon go back into nothingness, a resident at a centre for retarded adults. In this way he leaves a legacy for humanity – just in time, for soon forgetfulness will wipe out the languages he had learned, the insights into all the domains of human enquiry, and the skills that he had developed: reading, writing, and growing inside as a complex being, Universal Man.

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  7.Look at this picture: what do you think science should focus on?