Charlie Gordon Passes the Test of Time

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Spring 2004 by Ickes-Dunbar, Andrea

We have just finished reading the short story "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. For twenty years my eighth-grade students and I have agonized with Charlie, have hoped for him, and have felt outrage on his behalf. Sixty times I, along with my students, have endured the emotional rise of Charlie Gordon's meteoric ascent from mental disability to the pinnacle of cognitive capacity and his tragic fall into intellectual oblivion. With each reading, my heart constricts and my eyes brim with tears.

The ubiquitous and enduring presence of this story in the eighthgrade public school curriculum makes it almost unnecessary to introduce Charlie Gordon to most adult readers. "My grandpa read this story," announced one of my students today in amazement. At least two generations of readers are familiar with the story, in which a man with mental retardation is granted the opportunity to undergo experimental surgery that temporarily triples his intelligence. We meet Charlie through his own journal entries and are immediately captivated by his heartwarming sincerity. Here is a man who desperately wants to be like others in the hope that he will have friends and be able to participate fully in the social world. Following surgery, Charlie's intelligence increases rapidly and with it his perception of social complexity. As Charlie matures, so do his relationships with his coworkers and former "friends," his teacher, and his doctors. However, increased intelligence does not hold the key to positive social interactions, to happiness, or to peace of mind.

Ultimately, Charlie's mental state regresses; his giftedness evaporates. The reader is left with a profound sense of nostalgia for the elusive happiness that might have been.

Charlie Gordon's dilemma is vividly drawn and intensely relevant to most students. Adolescent readers are struggling with their own emerging intellect and conflicting social needs. They often experience troubled relationships with peers who are perceived as "different." Each student brings to the story his or her own perspective and predicament.

For some students, the text is extremely challenging. Some students are strikingly similar to Charlie at his most naive and literal-minded. Others are self-conscious as Charlie approximates, then surpasses their own capabilities. Many students remark that their empathy toward Charlie diminishes as he becomes an increasingly competent adult.

Students chuckle patronizingly at Charlie's exuberant discovery of punctuation, even as they themselves continue to misuse conventions and misspell common homophones. Some gifted students react with self-recognition when Charlie talks about masking his superiority so as not to alienate those around him, a phenomenon that the author refers to as "the Wedge of Loneliness." All flare up with righteous indignation at the meanness of Charlie's supposed friends. Most acknowledge their own occasional cruelty toward others. Many squirm at the suggestion that there are "Charlies" among their peers who are ostracized and ridiculed, and they frequently resolve in their reading journals to treat others better. Most young readers find Charlie utterly convincing and often respond as if the story were factual rather than science fiction.

But what can a sixty-year-old reader bring to the sixtieth read? Always something new, as it turns out. Each year, I discover some "peripheral" that enriches the classroom experience. Early on, I made inkblots and mock Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards so that students could appreciate the disparity between their own imaginative capabilities and Charlie's. One year, I adapted a pencil-and-paper exercise to mimic the sensation of having a learning disability, imposed an unattainable time limit, then asked students to reflect on their own sensation of frustration and futility. From a television series on the human brain (Nova), I presented students with a brief questionnaire to introduce the concept of brain hemispherity. From a long-ago teacher-training workshop, I put together a quiz inviting students to compare their own behavioral intelligence with Charlie's. We watch the film, Charly, and discuss differences between the film and the story. Such activities encourage introspective reading. As the story unfolds, so does each student's self-understanding.

As a culminating activity, students participate in an improvisational role play. In this scenario, students are cast in several possible roles: potential brain-surgery candidates, the candidates' families and friends, a hospital administrator, a lawyer, news reporters, and so on. From these hypothetical perspectives, students discuss the moral implications of human experimental research and present plausible rationales. In this forced-choice scenario, students intensify their empathy for pivotal characters, heighten their awareness of multiple viewpoints, and confront their own feelings. Subsequent journal entries reveal that each enactment is intensely engaging and unique to a particular class.