Disabilities – a disaster for human nature? Many people think that being disabled means you cannot be as happy as “normal” people, but is that really true? Sometimes it can be the smartest people who are struggling the most. In the novella, “Flowers for Algernon” the main character Charlie Gordon deals with being disabled. “Flowers for Algernon” is a novella written by Daniel Keyes.
The novella “Flowers for Algernon” is about the 37-year old man Charlie Gordon. Charlie is not the typical 37-year old. He is mentally retarded, and he wants to be smarter. Charlie's dream is fulfilled when he is chosen to an experiment where he must undergo an operation. After the operation, he slowly becomes smarter and more self-conscious. As he gets smarter, he also gets more depressed. And towards the end of the novella, he is not as happy as he thought he would be.
The setting of the novella includes several locations: Charlie’s home, the laboratories, the backyard where Algernon is buried and the factory. The point of view is a first-person narrator limited to the main character Charlie Gordon. This means that everything we are told comes from how Charlie has experienced it and in what way he has written it down in the progress reports. Furthermore, because how the story is told the narrator’s reliability can be questioned as it is only how he has experienced it. It is also his change in character that makes the reader question his reliability. He goes from being a mentally retarded man into a super intelligent human being. The novella is an epistolary novel which means it is a novel written as a series of documents. This adds a form of realism to the novella and you get the feeling of you are reading a real doctors report. The novella starts in media res as the main character Charlie Gordon is told he should just write whatever he thinks etc.
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