Why Flowers for Algernon is such a successful short story.

A detailed Summary of Why Flowers for Algernon is such a successful short story.

In my opinion "Flowers for Algernon" written by Daniel Keyes is a successful short story because of Keyes superbly formed Characters, his brilliant format used and the many different themes he featured throughout the story.

"Flowers for Algernon" is a short story about a man of low intelligence, Charlie Gordon, who is asked to take part in a new breakthrough operation to improve his intellect. He hopes that one day he will become happy because he is smarter, but instead he becomes more isolated and unhappy than he was to start with. The story could have been named "Flowers for Charlie" because presumably Charlie would have suffered the same fate as Algernon, but this would mean I would know what was to happen to Charlie and would take some of the interest out of the text. The format in which Keyes wrote this story was very important to its success. It was written in diary form with Charlie Gordon being the author of the diary. I believe that it was written like this because it is a very personal form of writing, it gave me, the reader, a great view of just how rapid Charlie's progress and regression was and it is almost as if I was marking his progress reports the way Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur would have done. I think Keyes

"They said how come you went to the adult nite scool all by yourself Charlie. How did you find it. I said I asked pepul and sumbldy told me where I shud go to lern to read and spell good. They said why did you want to. I told them becaus all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb."

Daniel Keyes has incorporated many different themes into "Flowers for Algernon". The main ones being experimentation, discrimination and isolation. These themes both then and now are very important and I think go along way to account for the story's success. The book featured in the story Robinson Crusoe was used because it has many parallels with the story it too was written in diary form and features many of the same problems e.g. Isolation and Loneliness. If "Flowers for Algernon" had been centered around less topical subjects I do not think it would have been as successful.

"But I got a headache and a big lump on my head and black and blue all over. I think maybe I fell but Joe Carp says it was the cop they beat up drunks sometimes. I don't think so. Miss Kinnian says cops are to help people."

chose to make Charlie the narrator because he came across as very innocent and it is because of this innocence that I thought I was getting the whole of the story, when really Keyes is manipulating me into believing the story just because I believed Charlie. e.g. Some of the story lines are a little ludicrous, like the part when Charlie lined up the factory machines a new way saving the factory 10,000 pounds a year in labour. It is a bit far fetched that no one else in the factory had noticed this before, but still I believed it because it came from the hand of Charlie. Upon reading the story the first time Keyes was not apparent to me, but he was there making me play the part of Judge and Jury and because I was in effect in Charlie's mind throughout the story, I was able to come to conclusions much faster. Like the way I condemned what Dr Strauss and Dr Nemur were doing by using Charlie as a guinea pig, it was not a decision I came to at the end of the story, it was an opinion I had formed from very early on. Keyes also used Charlie to tell the story because he wanted me to laugh at him then most likely feel sorry for him later on, he has used humor along with pathos so that I got an insight into how the othe

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Approximate Word count = 1566
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English