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Charlie Bleckner's Flowers For Algernon

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“I don’t know which is worse. Not knowing what you are and being happy, or becoming what you always wanted to be and feeling alone.” (Bleckner, Flowers For Algernon) In the story Flowers For Algernon, Charlie Gordon is a 37-year-old man with an intellectual disability. He is selected for an artificial intelligence operation by Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur. The operation is a success; his IQ went from 67 to over 200. However, the effect only lasted for about a month. In this time, his whole world changed. Charlie’s decision about have the artificial intelligence operation had negative impacts on his life. To begin with, after the operation, Charlie is alone often and nobody wants to converse with him. “I am alone in my apartment at Mrs. Flynn’s boarding house more of the time and seldom speak to anyone.” (Keyes 236) Charlie is so intellectually far ahead of everyone else, nobody can have a fluent conversation with him. This causes a feeling …show more content…

Evidence for this is the fact that he was smart enough to realize that the people he believed were his friends were faking it and teasing and taunting him.“I think it’s a good thing about finding out about how everybody laughs at me. I thought about it a lot.” He now knows that they were just using him to laugh at him, so now he knows not to trust them. However, this is not a positive thing, because all the people he thought were his friends were just pretending, and that is a lot to take in. Be that as it may, he can also use his intelligence to study his operation to help others with an intellectual disability like his own. “I have been given a lab of my own and permission to go ahead with the research. I’m onto something.” He is using what he’s been given from the operation to help others. However, the operations are too advanced for anyone else to understand and he realizes that there is no way to reverse the deterioration of his

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