2.21.2010

Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon is a fiction story about a mentally retarded man named Charlie Gordon.The story is made up of a series of progress reports written by Charlie. Flowers for Algernon is written from Charlie's perspective. When first reading the story, readers would immediately notice that the first few progress reports are full of grammatical errors. As they read further on, they would realise that it was purposely written like that. In the the first progress report, Charlie introduces himself. As the story gets on, Charlie writes about the tests he had gone through and his fears of failing the tests given to him and his hopes that he could still have the operation. At the point, readers will still be quite confused by what this story is about and what was the operation which Charlie wanted to have so much. The next few progress reports in the story explains quite a bit of reader's questions and readers would get a clearer view of the story.After the operations, Charlie expresses his disappointment that nothing had happened and that he was still not smart yet.The quality of Charlie's progress reports starts getting better, although there were still quite a few grammatical errors.The following progress reports describe Charlie's relationship with his coworkers.Though his coworkers make fun of him, Charlie still thinks that they were his friends. The next  few report expresses his delight at beating Algernon and his growing awareness that coworkers were making fun of him instead of being his friends. Charlie also discovers that he is starting to love Miss Kinnian. At this point, Charlie has already became very smart and he has started using more complicated words to write his progress reports. In the next few reports, he gets kicked out of the factory.He also starts getting interested in the area of increasing human intelligence and Algernon starts getting aggressive. Charlie finds out that he would regress as well. In the next few reports, Charlie starts regressing. He expresses his fear of losing everything he had perviously knew and hopes that he could retain some of the things that he had learnt. Charlie also starts using simple words again.At the end of the story, Charlie reverts back to being mentally retarded and decides to move away as he did not want to be pitied by others. He expresses hopes of learning how to read again and having a fresh start.

1 comment:

  1. It has fully expressed the actual story in a strong and powerful tone. However, it needs to analyse the story and explains in his own words of what the story tells us and not just summarize the story plainly. Also, it does not make us think about the story so in my opinion, he should add some questions which hooks us to think about it. This reiew is good yet not great so the blogger should strive hard and do more powerful blogs like this, only better. In short, this expressful piece of writing still has its cons which can be better.

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