Post 3: Flowers for Algernon - Royce Le

I honestly love this book at this point. The self-discovery through Charlie is amazing and I cannot put it into words. A 32-year old man is starting to get intelligent and achieving his dream of being smart and learning. “So even if I’m getting intelligent and learning a lot of new things, he thinks I’m still a boy about women” (p. 48) I find that quote very amusing because it adds a bit of humor into the book as well! I love how he discovers all these new emotions such as anger, confusion, and shyness. “A look passed between them. I felt the blood rush to my face again. They were laughing at me” (p. 57) I like how Charlie is not only having an epiphany about himself, but also the world around him, taken from observation between a fight from both Strauss and Nemur. “They called each other names ---opportunist, cynic, pessimist---and I found myself frightened. I walked for a long time trying to figure out why I was so frightened. I was seeing them clearly for the first time---not gods or even heroes, but just two men worried about getting something out of their work” (p. 69). As the story progresses, he realizes now that there are moral judgments to be made and moral obligations to be implemented while being a human. I feel sorry for Charlie because he was never faced with this type of situation; even Nemur says that Charlie was only an “inanimate object” before his operation (p. 89). A real theme to the story I see now is confliction between smarts and emotion, human nature, and self-discovery because of all the events that has been put through Charlie in cases where his intellectual growth has been growing steadily to the point where he is almost smarter than those around him but he is not emotionally ready to handle sadness, anger, confusion, love, frustration, and moral obligations is a great point to mention too. Although Charlie is discovering all these new aspects of life such as emotion and moral obligations through observing people, he will not know how to handle it until he goes through the emotions and trials himself. I predict that in these few last stretches of the book, Charlie is going to be at the height of understanding life but his brain will soon deteriorate just like I have heard rumors about in the book but also because of defects known in the science world.