Charlie Gordon Monologue

People say that life is an adventure, filled with strangers and new experiences. But life is an adventure unlike any other because you get to guide it in the direction you wish to go. Along the way, problems are faced, solutions are put into action, and memories are made. Each of these events cause lessons to be learned, perspectives to be changed, and personalities to be altered. These sorts of life events—major or minor—cause the human identity to change. But the question is not whether or not they do in fact cause change, it is how this change is brought about. The processes of decision making, interacting with others, struggling and learning all come together in an event to change the human identity.
It is the decision that launches you
into an event. The act of choice leads you towards the places you will go and the challenges that you will face. Frost states, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” The metaphoric path referred to in the poem represents each and every choice that is made in life, and how much power that each of those decisions have. Not only that, but how each one builds off of the previous decision made before that. The decisions you make lead you to the event, but once you are there the idea of choice does not end. “The actions you take, the people you spend time with, and the principles you choose to defend will define your identity.” (Hoffman) Once you have put yourself into a situation, there are many other things you have to account for. You have to decide who you want to be and what you want to do in the circumstance to show that version of yourself. With this being said, your identity is represented by the choices you make that take you to the adventure and the steps you take during it.
Whether it be someone new, someone you used to know, or someone that never left your side, the people that you surround yourself with play a huge role in not only the adventure, but your identity as well. Together, you are seeing the same things, learning the same lessons, and facing the same problems, which means that all of you have the power to influence one another. This kind of influence is portrayed by Lange in her novel. Butter finds himself really lonely, held back from the life of an average teenager because of his weight. After he creates a website announcing his death, his fellow classmates finally begin to notice him. Butter finds himself fitting in with the cool crowd, but soon realized that all of his friends were not really alongside him at all, but instead rooting him on from a distance. “I didn’t correct Anna that she didn’t know me—that none of them knew me—before the website.” (Lange 183) He had let himself get so mixed up in the popularity that he lost himself as a person, letting others change who he was. He let them define him because, “you are whom you choose to befriend.” (Hoffman)
There is a point in every journey where you struggle to identify yourself, losing track of the you you were before.
In Charlie Gordon’s case, the struggle begins when he was born with a mental disability. A scientific outbreak allows Charlie to undergo an operation to enhance his brain capacity. Suddenly he is able to understand and learn so many things about himself and life and he changes into almost a completely different person. But the old Charlie still exists inside of him and this is a constant battle inside his head. He learns that “you can’t put up a new building on a site until you destroy the old one.” (Keyes 200) This metaphor represents his own understanding of himself. He was supposed to become smart and therefore become happy, but instead he is in a constant state of confusion and anger while his brain is at war. The only thing that the two versions of himself have in common is a name, and a name means nothing when two people are so completely different. While he does indeed try to break down the old Charlie, he realizes that form will never truly go
away. The moment of realization may not be only one moment, but a series of them that allow you to understand who you are and the changes that have taken place. This is true of Nick Warren who suffered a traumatic experience that cost her sister’s life. She does not remember what happened the night of the accident and believes that her sister is alive all this time. She begins to take on the role of her sister, assuming her identity. It is not until much later on does she realize that she lost her sister. This moment of realization hit her hard and she thinks, “except she did live on inside me—she grew there rooted like a flower, so gradually I didn’t notice...but no the roots have been torn out, the wild, beautiful flower pruned back, and I’m left with nothing but a hole.” (Oliver 308) She lost someone that was close to her, someone that had always been a part of her and she did not understand who she was without her. For example, her sister was rebellious and carefree which made Nick carry the role of her protector, with her gone, Nick could no longer keep that piece of her identity. Once she realized that her sister really was gone, Nick began to focus on herself, getting the help she needed and learning about herself as an individual.
At the end of every journey you take a second to remember what had happened and evaluate the changes that have been made. Each author wrote about characters that faced major life events. The people that they were before were not the same characters that were left at the end. Butter was a lonely, high schooler that let his weight get in the way of his success, his goals were not the ones that he decided for himself. After his near death experience he wanted to try new things that he would never have wanted to do before. Charlie a man of little intelligence that finally captured a glimpse of a life that he was not meant to live through his eyes. He went back to the lifestyle that he lived before, but he was happy and even if only a little, he understood some things more so than before. Nick was confused and traumatized, guilt preventing her from seeing the truth. She returned home with a new sense of self, the memories of her sister still close, but now able to live her life without the fear of breaking away from herself. Although these characters are fictional, the paths they were traveling and the identities they were carrying are realistic.
There is a process to every adventure beginning with a choice and ending with a transition.
In between you may surround yourself with new people or you may struggle to see yourself for a while, but at the end you will take a step back and realize that you learned valuable lessons about life and yourself. Identity is about many things, but the places that you have seen, the adventures that you have completed, and the journeys that will never truly end define you. You get to choose your adventure and your identity, there will be challenges and obstacles and things might not always go as planned, but you will always be you even if that you is slightly
different.