Post 4: Flowers for Algernon - Royce Le

In this last post, I want to emphasize really on the questions I have in this book, and the theme and moral lesson that the author wants readers to take and hold on their minds for the rest of their lives. Now near the ending of the book where Charlie starts to realize that his intelligence is going to be taken away from him, I feel the need to ask the question how does this impact him mentally? As he is retrogressing back into his original illness, I can’t fathom what is going through his Charlie’s mind. To be able to forget a whole language and forget all the skills learned just in a matter of seconds is unbelievable. I can relate this to how I knew Vietnamese all my life and then once I started growing up, I forgot how to do some of the sounds that some words make and then I don’t retain the word, or it does not seem natural to me. A moral lesson to be gathered in this book is to be more accepting and open minded, to be intelligent yet emotionally understanding, and to be aware of what is around us. To be reminded of the gift of knowledge and consciousness that is given to us humans through Flowers for Algernon is touching, because of Charlie’s experiences with emotion and insight for only a limited amount of time, readers see how precious the mind can be when we have the ability to control it. Being and feeling love, being and feeling loved, those are something that all humans and animals experience either consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously. Charlie wanted to feel the embrace of the one he loved with Alice and Algernon had his female mice friend, but both experienced the emotion and passion in their decline of knowledge and awareness. Nonetheless, in the end, people treated Charlie with more respect and care after they realized that yes, even though he is ill and disabled, he is a human being, he is not an “inanimate object,” but person with feelings and a soul that knows what love and friends are. “Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go” (p. 311).