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Charlie Gordon Flowers For Algernon Quotes

Decent Essays

Science is continuing its growth to impact the human civilization in such ways that could never be thought of before. Such growth is demonstrated in Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes when two doctors, Dr. Nemur and Dr. Strauss, perform a surgical operation on their “test subject” Charlie Gordon to attempt to triple his IQ. As astounding as that sounds, they didn’t realize that operating on Charlie could have many consequences. Charlie’s happiness decreased, the doctors did not follow proper ethical procedures, and at the end of all, Charlie died. All in all, in Flowers for Algernon, the doctors made a very bad choice by choosing Charlie Gordon as their test subject for their intelligence-boosting operation as they did not follow proper …show more content…

In the story, Charlie stated in his journal entry: “Anyway I bet Im the first dumb person in the world who ever found out somthing importent for sience” (Keyes 209). The quote clearly demonstrates that Charlie’s hopes have been brought down along with his motivation as he refers to himself as a “dumb person”. Another thing that Charlie states in his journal entry is: “Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you” (Keyes 210). The sentence expresses Charlie’s thoughts and shows what he really learned from the surgery and all the experience. Now the opposing side may state that the surgery increased Charlie’s confidence and taught him how to coorperate with others around him, but they are incorrect as his confidence was only increased temporarily when he had high intelligence and he learned to cooperate with others by letting them treat him unfairly. Once his IQ came back down, he was unhappy, demotivated, and eventually decided to leave the city so people don’t fell bad for him. In the story, Charlie said towards the end: “...so Im going someplace where nobody knows that Charlie Gordon was once a genus and now he cant even reed a book or rite good” (Keyes 209). After considering Charlie’s thoughts and statements after the operation, it is easy to say that the result of the operation on Charlie had reduced his morale and taught him the wrong

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