Flowers for Algernon

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON

This is a touching story about a man who wasn't smart as everyone else but he tried to learn anyway. Even though he only wanted to be like everybody else he was persistent. He went through an operation only knowing that it would make him smarter. People treated him terribly but he was ignorant and didn't even understand that he was being made fun of.

As time went on he began to get smarter and smarter as he easily grasped knowledge. His reading and writing skills improved as time passed and he also began to realize he was being made fun of by the people he had thought was his friends. Blind to these things he was no more. He finally realized how dumb he had acted and how he was so mistreated. He could now beat the mouse named Algernon at the race he was doing since the beginning of the project. This mouse becomes his friend in this story and is the reason for this title. All the people at the place he worked began to change in how they looked at him since he had gotten smarter. They acted more frightened of him and did not treat or talk to him the same as before, if they even if they talk to him at all. He feels alone now because nobody understands him. It gets up to the point where he is fired from his job.

After some time Algernon starts to get unresponsive, less intelligent, and eventually dies. After an autopsy it appears that his intelligence had regressed and eventually killed him. Soon his intelligence started to regress too and he slowly began to forget everything he had learned. It ended sadly with him becoming the way he was in the beginning and he moves on to another place where nobody will feel sorry for him and nobody will ever know he was smart.

This story was science fiction do to the fact that he was made smarter by the science. Also not many other fiction or nonfiction genres support this selection.