Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (+ Book Club Discussion)
This voicey, layered, devastating sci-fi about the confusion of permanence vs. loss hit harder in adulthood—and earned a spot in my hall of fame.
Published January 11, 2025



Novel: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Release Date: April 1959
Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
Format: eBook
Source: Library
Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.
As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?
Why I Picked It Up
I remember reading Flowers for Algernon when I was younger and finding it sad, but I didn't remember specifics—besides Charlie's operation, that he worked in a bakery, or snippets with Faye. I thought about it the other week so placed a library hold and started it before bed. I ended up staying up until 1 A.M. (rare, voluntarily, as I'm a morning person) because I couldn't put it down.
Flowers for Algernon is layered and powerful, with the unsaid doing just as much work as the said—one of those books that made me go, "now, THIS is the point." I don't cry often over books (or really at all nowadays), so doing was significant and perhaps also cathartic. I got so much from the novel, and so Flowers for Algernon entered my hall of fame for good. Wow. I'm still hungover from it.
The Risky Tone & Voice
Flowers for Algernon was published a long time ago, so I'm sure the terminology included in the book has changed, and that the ethics of writing the first-person POV of a mentally disabled man may be considered differently re: sensitivity; for the "should he have?" question, I'd defer to writers and reviewers who know more about the subject. I don't know enough about this author's ability, accuracy, or effect in displaying the emotional processing of this particular disability to evaluate the portrayal.
From a purely literary/craft perspective, I'm not sure the book would be as effective without that lens, and I respected the sheer difficulty of achieving a feat like this novel. Flowers for Algernon is told through self-reported reports and journal entries submitted to the lab responsible for Charlie's surgery, and it's "show not tell" in the sense that the form of the storytelling does just as much as the content. (Brilliant.) It reminds me a lot of Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (another favorite) for that.
We see what Charlie doesn't in some cases, and choices in spelling, grammar, focus, and even memory that deliberately change his voice throughout to illustrate the journey.
Charlie's Characterization (& Significant Change)
Charlie himself is innocent and kind, but not because he "doesn't know any better," so I don't mean that as a simplification of his character. He deals with a lot of moral and emotional changes as his brain adjusts to his intellectual acceleration, and those shifts speak a lot to how we view personhood and perceive others.
He treated others as people and then ideas and then gods and then ideas and then people again, and so on and so forth depending on where he was at a given time, and that made me think deeply about how much our perception of others depends on how well we know ourselves at a given time too.
I did love this idea, partly introduced in Norwegian Wood, that we allow ourselves to be fully human always but can unintentionally flatten others depending on where we are internally. We might not always be capable of seeing them with the same level of complexity we give ourselves (although it's sure worth aiming for. That's a big struggle of Charlie's. How can he possibly see others when he's changing so quickly that he can't even keep up with himself?)
“ One of the things that confuses me is never really knowing when something comes up from my past, whether it really happened that way, or if that was the way it seemed to be at the time, or if I’m inventing it. I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up. Everything is strangely slow-motion and blurred.”
There's a contradictory push-pull that makes any connection almost threatening to Charlie's newfound stability, especially as he remembers the pain of his family's rejection and fears losing control over his mind and body. Before surgery, few people treated him with the dignity, respect, and fullness he deserved, and the ripple effects of that are significant. His old self is still a (deserving) part of him, and could reappear at any time—but now his self-awareness has made him deeply ashamed of that old self. The dissonance messes with his head, and makes him unwilling to trust. He can't risk losing control over his new self by exposing any vulnerability, and he doesn't want to go back.
As he learns more about others, one struggle he articulated beautifully was that he can't handle how our levels of understanding other people are constantly fluctuating. As he grows and warps and regresses, misalignment with another person feels inevitable—so genuine connection feels impossible. The words are never right. Their minds are in different places. On one hand, he views mutual understanding as crucial to his ability to connect deeply with someone, but doubts that it's even possible because of the constant potential for mismatch.
“"I’ve got to grow up. For me it means everything. . . . ” I talked on and on, spewing out of myself every doubt and fear that bubbled to the surface. [Alice] was my sounding board and she sat there hypnotized. I felt myself grow warm, feverish, until I thought my body was on fire. I was burning out the infection in front of someone I cared about, and that made all the difference.”
Paradoxically, Charlie craves being deeply seen but secretly believes whoever does will eventually realize he's defective and reject him when he's at his weakest. Real emotional connection (like with Alice) makes his old and new selves clash, and he shuts down in response—sometimes consciously and sometimes not. The entire process frustrates and embarrasses him, so he gets cynical instead; he longs for connection but doesn't actually believe it can ever possibly last at their speeds of change, especially as his shame builds and he confronts painful memories—like his family's rejection. But the irrationality of trusting is also kind of the point of love (and the scary part.)
“When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault. I don’t deserve someone as good as her. Why can’t I control myself just enough to keep on loving her? Just enough.”
“But as I walked away I felt a kind of simmering, then cooling, and finally a relief.”
“[My mom] was two people to me, and I never had any way of knowing which she would be. I would come to her for comforting, and her anger would break over me.”
In considering these growth mismatches, I thought of a children's book, actually: The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein, introduced to me by The Marginalian. It's not a perfect comparison because Charlie suffers more from hyperindependence than looking to be "completed" with another (and I relate to the former too), but the story fits with the bumbling, jagged confusion of growing at different rates—and sometimes outpacing others around you, or vice versa.
Charlie rarely feels on the same plane as others, making it hard to connect in a way that feels genuine either. His growth in one area pushes and changes his other domains, so he is constantly (and quickly) changing, and unable to keep up with the ripple effects.


This idea of really "seeing" others as real was sparked by my recent read of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Marukami too, but for a different reason; those characters were convinced they could never change their worldviews, while Charlie couldn't keep up with how quickly he was changing. Both retreated inward in response, only able to rely on themselves. But for that reason, they missed some real opportunities to deepen and validate their connection with others, however imperfect their understanding of each other might be.
“That made me angry. Probably because I didn’t really understand what she was driving at. More and more these days she didn’t come right out and say what she meant. She hinted at things. She talked around them and expected me to know what she was thinking. And I listened, pretending I understood but inside I was afraid she would see that I missed the point completely.”
The Missing Piece Meets the Big O has always felt bittersweet to me, and Flowers for Algernon has a similar feel: capturing the impossibility of ever conveying yourself "properly" at a given time, because we're not static and can only ever describe a singular moment of clarity. We're all growing so, so quickly and unevenly. And that's not even getting into whether or not you're viewing yourself correctly and whether your words are accurate enough to convey where you are. And then whether or not you feel like someone will stick around when seeing you confused, or at your worst.
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.—Anais Nin”
I'm sure rereading Flowers for Algernon will coax out new layers in me with every reread, but that thread felt especially poignant to me.
Themes!!! And Pacing
Often, in books, I'm secretly or unintentionally looking for that exact moment an author puts into words something I've felt but couldn't describe. My favorite works are voicey (in the specific) but observant (in the universal), and Charlie's moments of affected intellectualism (like On Love by Alain de Botton) pair nicely with the pared-down raw emotional circumstances he's plunged into without the pacing or plot suffering for it. It's meditative but absorbing and tense at the right moments, keeping me flipping pages long past when I should have been sleeping.
The book itself swings between hope and nihilism, connection and solitude, highs and lows, etc,. and it majorly targets those major fears we have (or me, at least) in wondering what stays permanent over time, and what exactly we should be holding onto (which is predictably a theme of my own book.)
“So this is how a person can come to despise himself—knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”
Charlie's brave in pushing through the uncertainty (even when falling apart) but has a tendency to self-sabotage, because then at least he can control the outcome without risking the unexpected judgment or rejection of others. Is it better to protect yourself by withdrawing into the self you can rely on? But what if you eventually lose those aspects of yourself that feel most "you"?
The Complexity Makes the Book (Alt Title: "Grace Gets Existential")
Flowers for Algernon is such a rich book re: relationships for all those reasons, because how we relate to others has so much to do with how we see ourselves (hence my recent obsession with attachment theory, the complex duality of twindom, etc,.) And then how much can you rely on yourself—because what if you change too?
A big theme/curiosity I write about in Mountain Sounds is how trust isn't limited to trusting yourself or trusting others in a given moment, but also in trusting yourself and others as they change into versions so significantly unrecognizable that they aren't even "the same" at all. How do you trust that someone to choose you if you were to do a complete one-eighty? What about "you" lingers? Is it just the act of dedication that matters in the end? How can you possibly choose to believe in the permanence of anything you don't control? What if your very ability to control anything is taken away?
The answer's not solely living in the present too or choosing to trust amidst disorientation (although that's part of it, of course) because that disregards how actively the past and future directly construct the now. How we carry and see ourselves has everything to do with the paths we see forward and what we've been through.
“What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months?”
“I am not only a thing but a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”
Charlie of course sees people differently before and after surgery. There are "friends" of his who laugh at and make fun of him, who he realizes later are terrible to him—which is devastating because the reader realizes it first. Those same "friends" get resentful towards him once he outpaces them.
There's a thoughtful convo in here about self-awareness and pity, and how people can be especially condescending to anyone who changes their mind (literally, in Charlie's case.) Even with the best intentions, that reaction almost demonizes the person's "old self," which Charlie realizes is still there (and protective of.) Charlie knows he's still fundamentally the same person and that he carries that "before" version with him. I'm sure there are also probably a lot of connections to make here about subconscious trauma, inherited family patterns, and the like, but I don't know enough about larger-scale psychology to speak to it.
Is he more himself now—the more crystallized version of his recent months—or the total sum of his most consistent self? Frequent or recent? What is more you: your memories? Your tendencies? Your latest epiphany? Ah! And the tension of this book is startling in handling these common existential questions because Charlie, unlike others, is keenly aware that he could lose this assurance of himself at any time. And then what's left behind?
Throughout, he picks up on a scientist's tendency to treat him like he didn't exist before his IQ shot up, which angers him because he's always been real. And then later, he sometimes does the same to others without realizing how in his own head he is.
“No one in this room considered me an individual—a human being. 'It might be said that Charlie Gordon did not really exist before this experiment...'”
The book is such a tribute to whether we let others around us change, and how we might have certain changes in others we unconsciously deem "acceptable" or not. Perhaps: you're allowed to change as long as you do so in a way that doesn't change my self-image.
I'm sure Flowers for Algernon, at its core, would be a shattering read for those experiencing any sort of cognitive injury or condition that makes them fear losing their sense of self—especially those who take such comfort in their memory and capability. It's beautiful and terrible in given moments, never ceasing to feel overwhelming. Like Charlie, you could think yourself in circles. I love psychology, but even then am aware that my love of it is imperfect, because it's only ever accurate in evaluating a single moment or pattern that could change.
“The most depressing thing is that so many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.”
External reassurance won't necessarily help Charlie fight his internal battles because he can't even trust the permanence of his POV. So those conflicts are something he has to iron out himself throughout the peaks and valleys of his evolution. And ugh. How affirming and gut-wrenching to read all at once. Cue that Pinterest quote of we're all just walking each other home, etc,. etc,. And then of course, he makes plenty of mistakes, hurts others, withdraws, etc,. because understanding himself doesn't make him immune to those tendencies.
I empathized with Charlie questioning how much self-awareness he wanted, how his hunger to read and write and fulfill his purpose made him obsessed. His solitude, work, and intelligence genuinely made him so happy and fulfilled to the extent that he almost didn't need anything else. (I totally understand this obsession.) When consumed, his new life was so solid and life-affirming and meaningful.
“I think she could tolerate another woman, but not this complete absorption in something she can't follow. I'm jealous of every moment away from the work—impatient with anyone who tries to steal my time.”
“ I’m on the edge of it. I sense it. They all think I’m killing myself at this pace, but what they don’t understand is that I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem.”
But the striking aspect of Flowers for Algernon is this fear that he could lose even that reliable "best" self at any moment because of the nature of the surgery experiment itself, so he struggled to determine what was temporary vs. permanent, and what exactly he could stomach losing.
Particular Aspects I Loved
- the creativity of the voice
- the sadness of realizing who might be unkind to you without you realizing
- the resentment some express as you change (because you threaten their self-image)
- the frustration of others not being straightforward or saying what they mean
- helplessness over what you can't control
- the sense that you can't possibly do what you're meant to quickly enough
- the pleasure of engaging in your purpose
- the frustration of feeling yourself go foggy
- the duality of old & new selves
- the confusion of love vs. understanding
- the depth of the family issues with his mom and sister (remarkably written)
- this pursuit of the sort of purity of the self, which reminds me of this absolutely phenomenal Aeon essay I just encountered that put so much of me into words—which the writers called "the aesthetics of understanding."
- the need for care and affection to temper the angst of change, and the horrible bravery in trusting yourself and others as you do
- etc,. etc,.
Overall Thoughts
I loved his obvious passion, and the tenderness and confusion present in every moment of this book. Flowers for Algernon is expansive and terrified without being hopeless, even in times of utter helplessness, and the overall feel is bittersweet in a way I deeply connect to. It's constantly edged by an awareness of loss, but that contrast also makes every fleeting moment or prayer of permanence more resonant.
How will any of us ever actually know what will remain of us and our efforts and our effects on others? Etc,. etc,. Is it better to know if something's temporary, and does that mean you should cast it aside or wring out everything you can before it's gone? At what point is heartache just baked into the process of trust?
Most friends and family members I talked to about this book after finishing said variations of, "Oh, that book is so sad," and it was, but I didn't see it as depressing, actually. I saw glimmers of hope in it, or at least a whole lot of meaning to hold onto. The book made me appreciate the temporary—even the mismatches and imperfections that frustrate Charlie so much.
“'But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.'”
Flowers for Algernon feels like a microcosm, a rare quality infusing my favorite books, and has so many gems, lines, and interactions that stunned me. It's sci-fi, sure, but it's about the internal, fundamentally.
Overall, it's gorgeous. In the same way that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius synthesized a lot for me on the nonfiction side recently, Flowers to Algernon did for me on the novel side—such a moving example of the pleasure and satisfaction of reading the right book at the right time. Read it. Please. And then tell me all about it.
“It is difficult to know whether I am experiencing a new sensation or recalling the past. It is impossible to tell what proportion is memory and what exists here and now—so that a strange compound is formed of memory and reality; past and present; response to stimuli stored in my brain centers, and response to stimuli in this room. It’s as if all the things I’ve learned have fused into a crystal universe spinning before me so that I can see all the facets of it reflected in gorgeous bursts of light. . . .”
“ It’s as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I’ve found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon—very soon—it will burst into consciousness.”
“ With the relief of knowing I had passed through a crisis, I sighed because there was nothing to hold me back. It was no time for fear or pretense, because it could never be this way with anyone else. All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting.”
For fans of:
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein; Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly; When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead; Black Mirror (TV); Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson.

