Charlie's Operation In Daniel Keyes Flowers For Algernon

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits” -Albert Einstein. In “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, Charlie is a mentally handicapped man who has a sixty eight IQ. He tries and tries to become smart but always fails until one day. On this day Charlie gets accepted to be part of a one of a kind experiment. Charlie takes part in the experiment and undergoes an operation that triples his IQ. At first the operation went excellent and there were no signs of anything bad. Unfortunately though, things began to go downhill fast. There are costs as a result of Charlie’s experiment and operation.
To begin with, most people want to have friends who they can talk to, open up to and hang have fun with. In the story, when talking about Charlie’s operation is that he lost a lot of his friends due to the experiment. In the text it says, “The first I knew of it was when Mr. Donnegan showed me the petition. Eight hundred and forty names,” (Keyes, 234). At this time Charlie had gotten his operation around one week ago and was just coming back to work. He was a …show more content…
However, after about a month of getting the treatment and after losing most of his friends and his job, he begins to get very depressed after learning that his intelligence will not be permanent. He begins to get so depressed that he sits inside all day in his room and at one point thinks about committing suicide and almost goes through with it. In the story it says, “I feel the darkness closing in. It’s hard to throw off thoughts of suicide,” (Keyes 240). At this point in the story Charlie is getting very troubled mentally, physically, and emotionally. This demonstrates that there were more costs than benefits caused by the operation because he almost died because he got so troubled which was all due to the

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Charlie's Operation In Daniel Keyes Flowers For Algernon