FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON: FREE LITERARY CRITICISM / ANALYSIS

Progress Report 17

Summary

October 3

Charlie is going downhill. He is depressed and thinks of suicide. Then thoughts of the "other" Charlie make him ashamed - "His life is not mine to throw away. I’ve just borrowed it for a while and now I’m being asked to return it." He keeps reminding himself he’s the only person to have such experiences and realizes that he must document them as his contribution to mankind. Charlie works very hard and avoids sleep. He plays loud music in order to keep awake and the neighbors call the police. His relationship with them becomes hostile, but he doesn’t even notice the change.

October 4

Charlie has an abrasive session of therapy with Strauss. Charlie is irritable and constantly tries to provoke Strauss. He compares him to a barber who gives "ego shampoos," and asks whether an "idiot" can have an "id?" Strauss lets him rave, and refuses to be provoked. Charlie lies back on his couch and has a strange experience. He sees "a blue-white glow from the walls and the ceiling gathering into a shimmering ball...forcing itself into my brain...and my eyes.... I have the feeling of floating...and yet without looking down I know my body is still here on the couch..." He feels as if he is released from the earth. "And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below." Unwillingly, Charlie is pulled back to earth and comes to consciousness. He wonders whether it is a hallucination or is it the kind of experience described by the mystics? He returns to reality feeling as if he is being thrown against the walls of a cave, beyond which is a "holy light" which is more than he can bear. He is filled with "pain" and "coldness and nausea" and he screams.

Charlie ends the therapy session, telling Strauss that he won’t come back. He is immensely depressed and is haunted by Plato’s words, "--the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes..." They seem to reflect the bizarre see-saw that his life has been, and the dreaded shrinking of his intelligence.

October 5

Charlie still struggles with his reports. He goes unwillingly to the Beekman lab, as he feels that he owes it to the team there. But, he balks at the grind of the same old mazes he used to do with Algernon. He notices that it is taking him much longer now than it did before to solve a maze. Burt puts him through the Rorschach inkblots, but he realizes that he has forgotten what to do. He becomes incoherent, then tells Burt that he is not a guinea pig and therefore should be left alone. He rejects Burt’s sympathy saying, "we don’t happen to belong on the same level. I passed your floor on the way up and now I’m passing it on the way down, and I don’t think I’ll be taking this elevator again." He then rushes out of the university.

October 7

Strauss visits Charlie but Charlie refuses to open the door to him. Charlie tries to read ‘Paradise Lost’ which he loved, but he can’t ‘make sense’ of it. He relives the awful past when his mother had tried to teach him reading and had threatened ‘to beat it into him until he learns.’ In anguish, Charlie breaks the binding and rips the pages out. He leaves it lying on the floor "its torn white tongues were laughing because I couldn’t understand what they were saying." He prays, "I’ve got to try to hold onto some of the things I’ve learned. Please God, don’t take it all away."

October 10

Charlie wanders about at night, aimlessly. He first stands on the streets, looking "at faces." Once, a policeman takes him home when he is lost. Another time, a pimp cheats him of ten dollars.

October 11

One morning, Charlie walks home to find Alice asleep there. She refuses all attempts to put her off, and insists that she has come, "because there’s still time. And I want to spend it with you." Charlie says there’s only enough time for him to spend with himself. She refuses to pity him, saying that, the future "was no secret" and intellectually, he is at her level now. She reaches out determinedly and this time the psychological barriers don’t go up. Charlie loves her "with more than my body." He feels he has "unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was." This sexual experience is not simple - "it was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. ... We merged to re-create and perpetuate the human spirit." It reminds him of the ‘strange vision’ he had experienced during his therapy with Strauss. He finds a kind of comfort in knowing that what they have, "is more than most people find in a lifetime."

October 14

Alice and Charlie go to a concert, but he finds he can’t pay attention for long. Alice’s presence is a "bad thing" because it makes him feel that he should fight his fate, "freeze" himself at this level, and not lose her.

October 17

Alice tells Charlie he has blank spells when he lies around for days and doesn’t know her. He knows it is inevitable, but he can’t help wondering if he can fight the regression, fight against becoming like all those at the Warren Home, like Charlie Gordon as he was. Charlie is in torment as he thinks about all this.

October 18

Charlie wants to look up some reference in his Report on the "Algernon-Gordon Effect" and discovers that, he can’t even understand the report any more. He is suffering and is angry at everything. Alice’s attempts to care for him and keep his home clean enrage him. The more she humors him, the wilder he gets remembering how the staff at the Warren home patiently humored the inmates. Charlie however is repentant when Alice weeps.

October 19

Charlie’s physical activity is getting affected. He blames Alice and prefers to think that her rearrangements are to blame. She responds with patience and pity and this irritates him further. The only thing he enjoys now is the T.V, which he watches all day and night. It is the "window" through which he is doomed to watch life, always as the observer. He is disgusted at giving in to drugging himself, "with this dishonest stuff that’s aimed at the child in me. Especially me, because the child in me is reclaiming my mind." Yet, he wants to forget everything that has happened to him as well. On finding a German research paper he had used in his work, he is shattered to find that he can no longer read German. All the languages he had learnt have been wiped clean from his mind!

October 21

After a constant struggle over the deliberate mess he had made of his apartment, Alice and Charlie have a final rave. Alice charges him with "wallowing in his own filth and self-pity," of mindlessly watching T.V and of snarling at people. She tells him that he was loved and respected more when he was retarded, and had a sense of humor. Charlie finds it increasingly hard to understand what she is saying. He accuses her of pushing him as his mother used to, and asks to be left alone now that he is "falling apart." Alice breaks down, then packs her bags and leaves.

October 25

Charlie can’t type any more. He broods over what Alice has said and decides that, if he keeps learning new things while forgetting old ones, he may not sink so fast. He starts reading feverishly at the library, hoping "to keep moving upward, no matter what happened." Strauss comes to see him. Charlie says that he can look after himself, and when he feels he can’t, he’ll board a train for the Warren Home. Fay now avoids him, she seems afraid of him. Only Mrs. Mooney, the landlady, visits him with hot food. Charlie is sure that Strauss or Alice must have asked her to do so.

November 1

Charlie reads, irrespective of the fact, whether or not he can understand. He reads "Don Quixote" and has a constant feeling that he knew the meaning behind the windmills, the castles and the dragons, but he can’t remember. He watches people from his window, and lies in bed most of the time. He now finds it difficult to write the progress reports.

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes Free BookNotes Summary

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