My Japanese teacher made us bring home a book, "Flowers for Algernon", by Daniel Keyes. It's supposed to be a classic, yet I have never heard of it. With nothing better to do after we got home from church last night, I started reading it. I just finished the book and I have to applaud the storyline. The book is in a journal-entry form that records the author's intellectual progress credited to an experimental surgery. It is so well-written that except for a few momentary lapses, you actually see the world through the eyes of Charlie Gordon. You feel his struggles, his confusion at all his newfound knowledge, and you feel his fear of being laughed at and his fear of regressing back to his original retarded state.
The parts of the story that touched me the most were the parts of the journal when Charlie innocently marked down happy events in his life when he was laughing with the people that he thought were his friends, yet was unknowingly the butt of their jokes. His simple mind did not permit him to see what was really happening, and so he saw only good in everything and everyone in his life. Sadly, attaining intelligence turned Charlie into a suspicious cynic who became angry at the world.
A must-read!
A must-read!
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