Flowers for Algernon: The Essence of Life Itself
Have you read the renowned science fiction story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes?
Or the expanded novel version that was published seven years after the story, in 1966?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
Along with novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Flowers for Algernon was the most popular and impactful book that I taught during my 35-year career as a junior college instructor in English literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Incident_of_the_Dog_in_the_Night-Time
Flowers for Algernon tells the story of Charlie Gordon, an intellectually challenged adult, who is chosen to undergo an operation which is meant to increase what is deemed his low IQ. The operation had previously been performed, apparently with success, upon Algernon, a laboratory mouse, and Charlie is put forward as a first human candidate given his burning ambition to become “smart” like his colleagues who do various forms of menial labour in his workplace.
The book chronicles Charlie’s initial intellectual awakening, which is brief but revealing as he recognizes the cruelty of humanity and the ambiguity of what he previously regarded as intelligence. The “positive” effects of the operation prove to be short lived, and Charlie soon regresses to his original state, with the difference that he loses his refreshing naivety, retaining a baggage of cynicism and defeat, after having experienced love, sexuality, and a recognition of corrosive bullying, ambition, and disdain.
In class, student readers passionately debated whether the scientists of the book had a right to persuade Charlie to undergo the experimental procedure; whether he could offer anything even remotely resembling informed consent; whether he was better off in his naïve, prelapsarian state or in a state of awareness, characterized by knowledge and insight but also by pain and defeat. Essentially they asked themselves whether, as Tennyson poetically phrased it, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
When studying Flowers for Algernon, we would watch the 1990 film Awakenings, featuring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro, based on the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks, who spearheaded an experiment in the 1960s to “awaken” patients rendered catatonic by an outbreak of encephalitis, which had occurred some 40 years earlier, through the experimental administering of the drug L-DOPA, normally prescribed for people living with Parkinson’s disease.
Many of the same ethical dilemmas and philosophical issues were addressed in the film as in Flowers for Algernon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awakenings
As I feel myself exiting the theatre of life, with one (broken) foot already out the door, these memories of classroom discussions have become particularly acute and significant. I’m living my Charlie Gordon moment as I feel my mental and physical acuity quickly slipping away, with the near inevitable onset of dementia, a condition that eventually robbed both my parents and many close relatives of their sense of self. Charlie undertakes to chronicle his decline as he experiences it in real time; this is my endeavour too.
These personal experiences are at once shattering and perfectly banal, as are the questions that they elicit: What has been the point of this brief flash of existence, soon to vanish into everlasting darkness? What have I accomplished? What have I left behind? For whom and for what?
In Awakenings, the character of Nurse Costello tries to comfort the Oliver Sacks stand-in, Dr. Sayer, in his moments of abject despair regarding the ephemeral nature of his patients’ miraculous recovery of their faculties, before they lapse back into the relative darkness of catatonia. What’s the point of their having so briefly experienced the rich tapestry of life, he laments, when it is snatched so quickly from them.
The nurse counters that self-awareness and life itself are “given and taken away from all of us.”
Why is it so difficult to find solace in that immutable, self-evident truth?
Your friend,
Robert
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