Positive Changes In Flowers For Algernon

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Positive Changes
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”- Confucius. In the short story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, Charlie Gordon is a mentally challenged man with the dream to become intelligent. Charlie is ignorant to the fact that others treat him differently because he has difficulty understanding basic things. Charlie is given the opportunity to undergo an experimental operation to triple his IQ of 68. Charlie accepts this offer and has the operation. After his surgery Charlie notices that his knowledge is gradually starting to develop. Charlie also sees that all along he was being made fun of because he was short-sighted. Little did Charlie know that the operations effects would eventually wear off. Even …show more content…

Charlie realizes that he was considered as stupid and that people are making fun of him. For instance after Charlie becomes brainy and learns the truth he quotes “I see that even in my dullness I knew that I was inferior, and that other people had something I lacked - something denied me” (Keyes 520). Charlie finally gets that even when he was lesser-minded he understood that something wasn’t right. What Charlie thought was friendship was truly just a false sense of someone showing human interaction (in this case bullying, not okay but something that occasionally happens) which in turn, his narrow mind found as friendship. It is important for Charlie to have faced these facts of the world. Another thing is Charlie learns that his brain capacity is one of the best in the world and that he has exceeded the knowledge of others around him. In addition after Charlie leaves his job at the factory, he writes “I have been given a lab of my own and permission to go ahead with the research. I’m on to something” (Keyes 521). Charlie starts to realize that he is capable of solving the mystery behind Algernon’s death. After working day and night Charlie achieves something that no other dumb person has ever done before. This makes Charlie more confident and pushes him along with the experiment even though he knows that he will face the same fate as Algernon. Charlie discovers that the world is not as perfect of a place that he thought it

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