Flowers For Algernon Theme Analysis

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“Flowers For Algernon” and Between Shades of Gray Themes. Between Shades of Grey is about a girl being taken by Joseph stalin to a labor camp while “Flowers For Algernon” is about a mentally handicapped man participating in an experiment to make him smarter. These two books sound different story wise, but they share and differ in a lot of themes. In both books the theme of coping with a loss is present. In “Flowers for Algernon” Charlie reacts to algernon dying by saying “I put algernon's body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard. I cried”(keyes 58). This quote shows the loss that charlie had to endure when he lost algernon. He has to cope with a close friend of his dying. This theme is also carried over to Between shades of …show more content…

The main theme in between shades of gray is “the will to live is stronger than any mental or physical pain”. The central theme in flowers for algernon is “do what you desire, but don’t do it because you aren't as something as others”. In Between shades of Gray, there is a very good example of this theme. “I scanned the group. Faces spoke to their future. I saw courage, anger, fear, and confusion. Others were hopeless. They had already given up. Which was I?” (sepetys 35). This quote means that Lina sees everyone's feelings, hears everyone complaining and talking about how they would rather be dead, and she does want to die, but she couldn’t leave her family. Not only that, the NKVD have hurt Lina, and abused her and her family, and she still decides to live. She could easily kill herself, or do something crazy to get her shot, but she doesn’t. In “Flowers for Algernon”, Charlie sees everyone who is smarter, and he wants to be smart, and he tries, but the is upset with the aftermath. “They said why did you want to. I told them becaus all my life i wantid to be smart and not dumb. But its very hard to be smart”(keyes 35). In this quote, Charlie is saying he wants to be smart, but other people make fun of him because he's not smart as them. In our group discussion, we discussed that we think that Charlie did want to be smart, but the pressure of others made him want to do the operation more.

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