The Scent of Flowers for Algernon

I don’t know what is worse; to not know what you are and be happy or to become what you’ve always wanted to be and feel lonely.

Flowers for Algernon is one of its kind. Despite having numerous works regarding differently able people, I doubt there is any other work as appreciable as this. It not only talks about a person’s experience of being different but also addresses other problems and terms.

Charlie, the protagonist of the novel, is very passionate about learning and becoming a better person. He tries very hard every day. He goes to informal education classes for slow adults. And that’s basically where he meets professors who ‘might be’ able to make him smarter. They claim to have carried out numerous experiment on other animals which had brought significant results. But they don’t know if the result will be permanent or short lived, and they don’t know what may come up as a consequence.

If you ask me: What’s use of this novel? What will I learn? It’s hard to put it all in words, but I’ll try my best.

This novel talks about the life of a mentally challenged person. It talks about how hard we push people to become what they are not. And how popular it is to be ‘normal’. That’s probably why Charlie wanted to be normal and smarter. It also talks about how much it matters to us what people think that so much of our life is shaped, unaware and unintentionally, trying to become what people think is ‘normal’, trying to fit in. The book also talks greatly about the world we have built for mentally challenged people. It portrays perfectly how such people are bullied, made fun of and used for ‘normal’ people’s benefit.

Much of this book was inspired by the writer’s real life experience. It had often occurred to the writer ‘what if people could be made smarter?’ His parents expected him to pursue a career in medicine, whereas he was driven to become a writer. When he was teaching English to students with special needs, one of them asked him whether it would be possible, if they worked hard and became smart, to be put into an ordinary class. The thought finally shaped itself into an idea.

Through Internet, I came to know that many characters in the novel were inspired by people in the writer’s life. The scientists who worked for making Charlie a smarter man, Nemur and Strauss, were inspired by the professors he met while studying psychoanalysis in grad-school. Algernon, the laboratory mouse, was inspired by a university dissection class, and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was the inspiration behind its name.

The book doesn’t speak of great things but little things – those important ones –  that are often ignored, and he has written about them in a great way. What I think makes this book so precious is that it is very personal. It addresses significant human behaviors that aren’t usually spoken of and hence go unnoticed.

What breaks my heart is that the things mentioned such a long time ago are still as fresh and happening in today’s world. With this work, the writer wanted to point out the fact that even humans are taken in the lab and are treated as nothing more than a specimen. These scientists forget that the humans, too, were individuals before they became part of the experiment. Nor is it a fair thing for any other creature, too. These creatures did, have and will always have a life apart from the experiment. The scientists, on the other hand, unfairly claim it as their professional right.