What Is Charlie Gordon's Acceptance Of Death

Sting once said, “The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment.” In other words, to live a life to the maximum, one must accept the fact that they will die one day. However, not everyone can easily embrace death, and may struggle to live a fulfilled life. This stage of crisis is depicted in Erik Erikson’s Stage Eight of human development. Here, mostly those in old age, will reflect upon their own life and find either happiness and satisfaction or disappointments and failures. Those who find disappointments and failures during their early life will despair and dread the thought of dying. Unfortunately, Charlie Gordon in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon faces a negative outcome, fearing his deteriorating intelligence like how an individual fears death.
To begin, Charlie’s outcome for Stage Eight is negative because he starts to deny his decreasing intelligence. For example, when Charlie tries to take the rorschach test, he does not “remember what” he has to do and
When he is writing his last progress report, he does not know why he turned “dumb agen” and worries if the reason is because he “dint try hard enuf or just some body put the evel eye on me”. However, he decides that he will “practis very hard” and “get a littel smarter and no what all the words are” (Keyes 310). This shows that Charlie is not satisfied with his life because he turned dumb again and can no longer understand the things he used to. Although he tries be hopeful, he is still not yet fully sure if he can turn smart once again. He is deeply scarred and pained because he misses having intelligence and different abilities. Just like many people who are disappointed with their life and fear death, Charlie is also not satisfied with his life and desires to fulfill it by getting his intelligence