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Charlie Gordon In Daniel Keyes Flowers Of Algernon

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Charlie Gordon is the protagonist in the short story “Flowers of Algernon,” written by Daniel Keyes. He is a 37 year old with a mental disability and an IQ of 68. Charlie works as a janitor and although he has quite a low IQ, he has a good attitude about changing his life, and to do whatever it takes for him to get smarter. Charlie goes to Miss Kinnian’s class for slow adults to get better at spelling and writing and potentially get smarter. Miss Kinnian teaches literacy skills to mentally retarded adults because she believes that being mentally disabled doesn’t make you less of a Human. Charlie and Miss Kinnian start out the story with a teacher-student relationship, but soon, it becomes a little more than back, but as the story reaches it’s …show more content…
Research shows that not all IQ tests yield the same results, and that taking tests at different occasion can also output different results. After Charlie gets the operation, he seems to understand the world and how it works better. He also understands that his “friends” Joe Carp and Frank Reilly were not really his friends. They were merely using his for their own amusement. Joe and Frank work at the factory with Charlie. As Charlie gets smarter, he finds out that he has no real friends at his job because they signed a petition to get him fired because he was getting too smart. Sometime after the operation, he said “…I meant about the mathematical variance equivalent in Dorbermann's Fifth Concerto.” This clearly shows that Charlie has become much more advance than he was before. As Charlie’s IQ goes back down, he says, “I dont know why Im dumb agen or what I did wrong maybe its becaus I dint try hard enuff.” He evidently forgets that his intelligence has lowered because the effect of the experiment was temporary, not because he didn’t try hard enough. We can also see that Charlie begins to misspell words like he used to before the

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