History Literature / FlowersForAlgernon

* TookALevelInCynic: As his intelligence grows, Charlie slowly comes to realize how his co-workers and other people around him have often taken advantage of his mental disability to frequently mock and play rather cruel tricks on him without him realizing it. As a result he becomes quite resentful towards them and more distrustful of other people in general.

* TookALevelInCynic: As his intelligence grows, Charlie slowly comes to realize how his co-workers and other people around him have taken often advantage of his mental disability to frequently mock and play rather cruel tricks on him realizing it. As a result he becomes quite resentful towards them and more distrustful of other people in general.

Charlie works at a bakery with people he considers his friends. His instructor, Alice Kinnian, teaches him at the Beakman College Institute for Retarded Adults, and she is the one who nominates him for a possible cure: an experimental surgery designed to improve his mental capacity. The researchers putting this surgery into action are looking for a human subject, having already had a successful result with the eponymous Algernon, a lab mouse.

-->-- {{epigraph}} to the novel, taken from '''Creator/{{Plato}}''''s ''Literature/TheRepublic, Book VII''

Written by Daniel Keyes and originally published in ''The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction'' (April 1959 issue), "Flowers for Algernon" is a ScienceFiction ShortStory that tells of a young man named Charlie Gordon who has an IQ of 68, [[IJustWantToBeNormal but tries hard to learn and become "normal"]]. In 1966 Keyes expanded the story into a {{Novel}}, which won the UsefulNotes/NebulaAward (tying with ''Literature/Babel17'') that year.

Told entirely in first-person journal entries ("progress reports") written by Charlie himself, the story does a wonderful job of depicting how his intelligence changes. It is frequently used in UsefulNotes/SchoolStudyMedia.

It's one of the more famous books that has been [[MoralGuardians banned from schools]], thanks to its sexual content and profanity (except for certain copies that have it [[{{Bowdlerization}} severely reduced]], so as to avoid it.)

The original short story won the UsefulNotes/HugoAward for Best Short Story in 1960. The novel won the UsefulNotes/NebulaAward for Best Novel in 1966 and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1967.

Adapted into the teleplay "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon", which aired as a 1961 episode of the anthology series ''The United States Steel Hour'' and starred Creator/CliffRobertson in the title role; Robertson later reprised the character in the 1968 [[TheFilmOfTheBook feature film]] ''Charly'', for which he won a Best Actor UsefulNotes/AcademyAward. There was also a 2000 MadeForTVMovie adaptation starring Creator/MatthewModine.

** Charlie's sexual issues are due to traumatic experiences with his mother; he almost has a reverse OedipusComplex, fearing his mother and relying on his father for protection.

* PhotographicMemory: The 2000 film shows Charlie remembering a passage from a book red 10 minutes back.
* PlatonicCave: Charlie's keyhole analogy, seen on the Tearjerker page, is this in spirit.

* RapeAsDrama: A horrifying example thrown out as background dressing: when Charlie visits his class for developmentally disabled adults, this time with enhanced intelligence, he takes note of a pretty blonde woman who giggles. She's had three abortions (given her mental state, QuestionableConsent is in play) until her family arranged a hysterectomy for her. Note, that means that doesn't stop her from being taken advantage of, it just stops the pregnancies.

* SecondaryCharacterTitle: Flowers For Algernon refers to the protagonist's fellow test subject - a white mouse. Averted in the film adaptation ''Charly''.

* ThirdPersonPerson: The final bar scene in the 2000 film, has Charlie starting to feel his old self breaking through. He initially says he can't dance... He shows off Algernon, and talks about Algernon's friend Charlie, who can dance and then goes to start dancing with the woman that met him.

* WhyCouldntYouBeDifferent: Charlie's mother Rose lived under the delusion that one day her son would be just like--or better than--everyone else. When his little sister Norma came along, Rose abandoned this hope and just heaped attention on Norma instead (see TheUnfavorite).

* GeniusSerum: The protagonist, Charlie, as well the eponymous lab rat undergo a surgical procedure that turns them from simpletons into geniuses. However, the effects are unfortunately temporary, and Charlie becomes even dumber than before.

* IJustWantToBeNormal: Charlie from suffers this both while intellectually disabled and a genius, as he despised being abused when he was disabled yet also resents how being a genius alienated him from everyone else.

* JadeColoredGlasses: Charlie after the operation. Dr. Nemur is even before it.
* JerkAss: After Charlie exceeds the intelligence of even the scientists who work on him, he repeatedly looks down on those around him for not being at his level of super-intelligence--even criticizing Strauss for not being fluent in as many languages ([[{{Omniglot}} 20!]]) as he is. However, Charlie makes it clear that he's bitter about the way others had treated him when he was intellectually disabled, as well as the fact that he finds the intelligence flip ironic. He's also called out on it later in the novel, and admits to being one, which makes him somewhat even more sympathetic in hindsight.

* AbusiveParents: Charlie's mother. She first refuses to acknowledge that Charlie is mentally disabled, and punishes him for it; [[spoiler: he even briefly mentions at one point that his mother hides him away in the cellar when company comes]]. When she later gives birth to a daughter, who is of normal intelligence, she blatantly favors her over Charlie, and eventually sends him away to an institution. When Charlie tries to pick up his baby sister, his mother slaps him and tells him that he has no business touching her even though he just wanted to hold her, and later threatens to put him in a cage if he ever touches a girl when having an erection.

* BringMyBrownPants: One of the few times it's PlayedForDrama. Charlie has a tendency, especially as a kid, to shit himself whenever he gets frightened, which doesn't take much considering he's mentally disabled. This just leads to more pain and suffering since then Rose decides she has to spank him, somehow thinking that disciplining him will stop him from being mentally disabled.

* DudeNotFunny: After operating the mixer in the 2000 film and heading to the bar, the trip prank wasn't funny - only the prankster was laughing, the rest were giving less appreciative looks.

* DumbIsGood: Discussed. Alice tells Charlie that he was a better man when he was intellectually disabled--he was more compassionate, warm, and friendly. Charlie, on the other hand, refuses to accept this; he says people only liked him more because being around him made them feel smarter. While it's true that Charlie starts becoming a JerkAss when he gains his intelligence, he [[DiscussedTrope discusses this trope]] by saying that there's nothing wrong with a good person trying to be smarter.

* FlowersForAlgernonSyndrome: The TropeNamer. In the story, the main character, cognitively disabled Charlie, undergoes a surgery that boosts his intelligence. To an astounding degree, as it turns out: his intellectual breadth and knowledge allow him to learn languages of all kinds, science of all branches, surpassing even those that performed the operation. Charlie, though, finds that [[IntelligenceEqualsIsolation his intelligence isolates him]] just as much as his dimness did before it. A side effect of the procedure that granted the intelligence was to eventually lose it. The book avoids the "ignorance is bliss" aesop; [[OhCrap Charlie is horrified]] when he finds out that he'll lose his high intelligence, and the depiction of his mental degeneration is played for drama. It implies that as Algernon died after his intelligence degraded, Charlie doesn't have long to live either. "The Algernon-Gordon Effect" is an in-universe thesis describing this trope, when Charlie's own research while he's super intelligent predicts what is going to happen--Charlie determines that the process was fundamentally doomed because the sheer speed of brain development was too biologically taxing, directly causing the brain to deteriorate after very long. Once Charlie fully reverts, he finds he can't live with the pity he now knows everyone has for him, and leaves to go somewhere where no one knows him.

* AbusiveParents: Charlie's mother. She first refuses to acknowledge that Charlie is mentally disabled, and punishes him for it [[spoiler: he even briefly mentions at one point that his mother hides him away in the cellar when company comes]]. When she later gives birth to a daughter, who is of normal intelligence, she blatantly favors her over Charlie, and eventually sends him away to an institution. When Charlie tries to pick up his baby sister, his mother slaps him and tells him that he has no business touching her even though he just wanted to hold her, and later threatens to put him in a cage if he ever touches a girl when having an erection.

* DownerEnding: The last fifty-or-so pages are so depressing it's amazing the book doesn't spontaneously combust. [[spoiler: Charlie becomes disgusted by the pity everyone feels for him and pushes them away as his mind continues to degrade, spending the last parts of the story alone and in despair. Furthermore, it is implied the worst is yet to come: Algernon and Charlie had the same surgery performed on them, and Algernon ended up degenerating and dying. In some editions this is made less subtle with the "d" in "bak yard," the final sentence of the book, trailing off into a long, messy line which implied Charlie died as he was writing. In other paperback versions, the ending is instead several pages left intentionally blank, suggesting Charlie either died, or mentally regressed so far that he'd become completely illiterate, essentially leaving him more severely disabled than at the beginning of the book. [[ThatWasTheLastEntry Either way, the implications are incredibly depressing.]] The only real bright spots are Charlie proving the operation unviable and making amends with his mother and sister before it was too late, and Charlie’s bakery “friends” becoming better people.]]

* IJustWantToBeNormal: Charlie from suffers this both while intellectually disabled and a genius.

* InsufferableGenius: Charlie after he becomes super-intelligent.

* SleepLearning: Charlie uses a TV that plays hypnopaedic instruction tapes while he's sleeping to learn rapidly.

* {{Technobabble}}: Some (mercifully short) [[HandWave explanations]] of the neuroscience behind Charlie's transformation. Essentially, the process is AppliedPhlebotinum though.
* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodSandwich: Charlie pays for a meal without eating it after seeing how the restaurant treats a slow busboy.

* YourDaysAreNumbered: [[spoiler: Hinted at. Both Charlie and Algernon are put through the same surgery that increased their intelligence ten fold. However, we soon see that Algernon's intelligence begins to deteriorate and it eventually dies. While the ending is left very ambiguous, it is possible that Charlie may very well suffer the same fate.]]