Estimated 26% of people 18 or older are diagnosable with a mental disability. Charlie Gordon, a 37 year old man, has a mental disability and undergoes an operation to make him smart, but the result is that he becomes too smart and then hostile and eventually dies. Daniel Keyes portrays a theme in Flowers for Algernon that since some situation can come back and bite a person, be careful what you wish for.
Charlie Gordon wishes he had friends all throughout the text, but when he has friends they do not act like friends to him. To begin with, while he has his fake friends they are always laughing at him in a mean way but Charlie does not know. For example, Charlie has bandages from his operation and “Frank Reilly said what did you do Charlie forget your key and open your door the hard way. That made me laff. Their really my friends and they like me.” Charlie wishes he had real friends and thinks he does but they always laugh at him. Along with them always laughing at Charlie, they beat him up but he does not know that they did. According to the text, Charlie thinks he …show more content…
To begin with, when Charlie is smart everyone avoids him and acts almost scared of him. For example, people are avoiding Charlie he “guess[s] it’ll take a little time for them to get used to the changes in me. Everybody seems to be frightened of me.” Charlie really wants to be smart to fit in but in the process everyone avoids him. Along with people avoiding him, when he is smart everyone begins to see that Algernon is getting hostile and it foreshadows what will happen to Charlie. For example,“they’re all pretending that Algernon’s behavior is not necessarily significant for me. But it’s hard to hide the fact that some of the other animals who were used in this experiment are showing strange behavior.” After Charlie realizes what will happen to him he regrets ever having the operation