Character List
Read an in-depth analysis of Turtle.
Read an in-depth analysis of Mattie.
Read an in-depth analysis of Estevan.
Analysis of Major Characters
Taylor Greer
Taylor Greer is gutsy and practical. She views her hometown as stifling and tiny, and she decides she wants to avoid the trap of an early pregnancy and make her escape to a more interesting life. Taylor’s spirited, quirky voice shapes the novel. She perceives things in an original fashion, communicating her wonder at the customs and landscape of the Southwest with unusual metaphors and folksy language. Taylor settles in Tucson, Arizona, because its landscape strikes her as outlandish; newness and amusement appeal to her more than comfort or familiarity. As she contends with dangerous poverty, an unasked-for child, and many other trials, Taylor’s wit and spirit remain intact.
Although never naïve, Taylor becomes even more worldly after learning about the political corruption and personal tragedy faced by Estevan and Esperanza and the abuse inflicted on Turtle. Her sympathetic reaction to the difficulties of others reveals Taylor’s tenderheartedness. Taylor cares for the abandoned and the exiled with increasing enthusiasm as the novel progresses. Mattie calls her a hero for risking her own safety in order to achieve a more just society. In some ways, Taylor is an archetypal hero: she leaves her home and family, descends into darkness, and reemerges to accomplish some good for the sake of her society. She also functions as Esperanza’s comedic counterpart. Whereas tragedy permanently enshrouds Esperanza’s life, Taylor has a chance to hold on to her daughter and her happiness. Unlike traditional female heroines, Taylor’s adventures do not revolve around finding or keeping a man. Her life focuses instead on females—primarily on Turtle, but also on her mother, her friend, and her mentor. The male-female love she experiences remains purely platonic.
Lou Ann
Lou Ann is soft, motherly, and worrisome; she fears her own death and the death of her child. Far more womanly in a traditional sense than Taylor is, she pines for her husband and expresses her conviction that marriages and love should last forever. A Kentuckian, she retains the innocence of a small-town girl. Despite this innocence and occasional spates of homesickness, Lou Ann demonstrates her grit by moving to Tucson and then staying there alone to raise a child over the objections of her female relatives. She and Taylor form a functional family, caring for their children and for each other.
Lou Ann undergoes a transformation from dependent housewife into strong single mother. She has feminist instincts from the beginning of the novel, but initially she does not express them. She remains silent even though the sight of the local strip joint makes her shudder; she notices that her house feels more whole with her female relatives present than with her husband; she reflects on the strength of her body during her pregnancy. Around Chapter Ten, Lou Ann changes. She begins to speak about the contradictions and injustices of gender relations. She tells Taylor that she despises the obscene painting on the door of the strip joint. She searches for a job and accepts that she will have to support herself. She acts more boldly, scolding Taylor when Taylor does not fight hard for her rights.
Estevan
Though a cast of strong women peoples The Bean Trees, the only male character of consequence is Estevan, whose presence grows more important as the novel progresses. Taylor’s affection for him suggests that he is a welcome addition to an otherwise exclusively female world. Estevan represents the opposite of the stereotypically chauvinistic American male. A good man, he counters the novel’s villainous and sexually predatory men, such as Turtle’s abuser, the prowler in the park, and the absentee Angel. We empathize with Estevan not only because of his kindness, but because he lacks a homeland. Like women and like the natural environment, he knows destruction and persecution. Via Estevan, Kingsolver dispels many myths about illegal immigrants. One myth holds that immigrants cannot speak English well, but Estevan speaks better English than any of the native English-speakers in the novel. His pristine English and impeccable grammar suggest his intelligence and industry.
Turtle
A history of abuse makes Turtle silent for much of the novel. She seems almost catatonic, anxious to remain unnoticed and therefore unmolested. However, as the novel progresses and Turtle begins to trust that Taylor will take good care of her, the three-year-old girl becomes increasingly talkative and charming. She begins to preface friends’ names with the word Ma: Lou Ann becomes Ma Woo-Ahn, for example. She demonstrates a connection with the earth, taking great pleasure in naming vegetables and playing with seeds or dirt. Her made-up songs concern vegetables, and her preferred bedtime story is the seed catalogue. This love of the land links her, Kingsolver suggests, to her Native American heritage.
Alice Greer
One of the first characters we meet, Alice Greer sets the precedent for the series of strong, loving women that come after her in the novel. Kingsolver suggests that children become what they are told they will become; because Newt Hardbine is told he will fail, for example, he does fail. In contrast, because Alice constantly tells Taylor she is wonderful and smart and will succeed, Taylor is wonderful and smart and successful. Alice also represents the independence from men advocated by the novel. She lives happily, sometimes married, sometimes not, and never imagines she needs a man in order to raise Taylor.
Mattie
Mattie acts as a mother to hundreds of people, including Taylor. She does not fit the typical portrait of a mother figure, however, for although she is wise and loving, she is also fearsomely intelligent and tough. Her combination safe house, garden, and tire shop symbolize Mattie’s combination of qualities. Mattie does not push anyone to act heroically, as she herself acts, but she does inspire heroism through her own actions. She also breathes fresh air into the lives of her provincial, undereducated friends with her work as an intellectual. The other characters only dimly grasp her work as an activist and an intellectual, but the fact that it exists points to a world outside the novel’s scope.
Important Quotations Explained
1. “I have always thought you had a wonderful way with words,” he said. “You don’t need to go fishing for big words in the dictionary. You are poetic, mi’ija.” . . . “Well, thank you for the compliment,” I said, “but that’s the biggest bunch of hogwash, what you said. When did I ever say anything poetic?” “Washing hogs is poetic,” he said.
These lines from Chapter Eight record a conversation between Estevan and Taylor. To emphasize the idea that immigrants should be treated with respect, Kingsolver pointedly makes Estevan, an immigrant, the character with the best command of the English language. He is better educated and more articulate than any of his friends, all of whom use slang and bad grammar. Kingsolver does not condemn those characters who use nonstandard English, as this quotation indicates; rather, she suggests that all forms of English can be considered poetic. Although Taylor wishes she could use bigger words, like Estevan does, Estevan points out that her slang and colloquial expressions are beautiful. Taylor’s “hogwash,” Esperanza’s silence, and Turtle’s vegetable songs all have their own bit of poetry.
2. Turtle shook her head. “Bean trees,” she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. They looked as much like beans as anything you’d ever care to eat. “Will you look at that,” I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees.
These lines, which come from Chapter Ten, occur as Lou Ann, Taylor, Turtle, and Dwayne Ray sit in Roosevelt Park (commonly known as “Dog Doo Park”). The quotation points to the novel’s idea that miracles happen in modest or unlikely places. Appropriately, it is Turtle who makes the discovery that gives the novel its title. Turtle is herself a miracle in an unlikely place. Like the bean trees discovered in the ugly park, Turtle is discovered in a barren parking lot. And like the dirty, barren park, which later seems magical, Turtle at first strikes Taylor as an unwanted burden, but gradually becomes more and more important to Taylor, until the possibility of losing Turtle becomes the main conflict in the novel.
3. Lou Ann shuddered. “That door’s what gets me. The way they made the door handle. Like a woman is something you shove on and walk right through. I try to ignore it, but it still gets me.” “Don’t ignore it, then,” I said. “Talk back to it. Say, ‘You can’t do that number on me, you shit-for-brains.’ . . . What I’m saying is you can’t just sit there, you got to get pissed off.”
In Chapter Ten, Lou Ann and Taylor discuss Fanny Heaven, the local strip joint. Lou Ann has just had her first job interview, during which her interviewer talked to her breasts instead of to her face. This quotation demonstrates Taylor’s usual feistiness and spirited support of her friend. With Taylor, Lou Ann feels comfortable articulating a disgust that until this point she kept secret. Previously, Lou Ann had tolerated the offensive strip club in silence, thinking of it as an unassailable part of her surroundings. Here, for the first time, she identifies her discomfort aloud, even identifying what particularly upsets her: the mural of a woman painted so that the door handle opens into the woman’s crotch. Kingsolver makes a point by including Fanny Heaven in her novel. The existence of the strip club suggests that the sexual violence or violent attacks suffered by women do not spring from nowhere, but are the byproduct of a society that objectifies and exploits women’s bodies.
4. The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.
This description comes in Chapter Twelve, at the time of the first rain, when Mattie takes her young friends into the desert so they can see the natural world come to life. This quotation, typical of Kingsolver’s descriptions of the natural landscape, shows her consciousness of the environment. It also exemplifies Kingsolver’s use of unusual metaphors. By describing the landscape as the palm of a human hand, Kingsolver personifies the mountains and city. Her phrase “resting in its cradle of mountains” likens the valley to a baby, and the phrases “city like a palm” and “life lines and heart lines” suggest an adult. The land embodies a life lived from birth to death. Taylor falls in love with the Arizona land and sky, and her appreciation for nature in all its forms, with all its surprises, mirrors the values the novel espouses.
5. It didn’t seem to matter to Turtle, she was happy where she was. . . . She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. And me. I was the main ingredient.
These lines recount Taylor’s thoughts at the end of the novel, in Chapter Seventeen, as she and Turtle head back to Tucson. With this final scene, Kingsolver provides a mirror image of Taylor’s first trip to Tucson with Turtle, during which the little girl’s behavior was entirely different. On the first trip, Turtle remained so silent and motionless that Turtle wondered if she had died. On this trip, Turtle remains wide awake, happily babbling about her vegetables. Most important, Turtle now includes names of people in her vegetable-soup song. This marks a change, because in the beginning, Turtle could not connect with people or form ties to them. By adding names of people she knows to her babble, Turtle shows she has begun to recover from her history of abuse and has gained the ability to trust people. Most significant is that she identifies Taylor as the “main ingredient.” For a space of time, Turtle demonstrated her confusion about her caretakers by calling most women in her life “Ma.” Now, she identifies Taylor as her mother. The last sentence of this quotation reaffirms not only Turtle’s attachment to Taylor, but also Taylor’s happiness in hearing herself identified as the main ingredient, and her confidence in herself as a mother.
SLAUGHTER-HOUSE FIVE
Character List
Character Analysis
Billy Pilgrim
Billy Pilgrim is the unlikeliest of antiwar heroes. An unpopular and complacent weakling even before the war (he prefers sinking to swimming), he becomes a joke as a soldier. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant, a duty that earns him disgust from his peers. With scant preparation for armed conflict, no weapons, and even an improper uniform, he is thrust abruptly into duty at the Battle of the Bulge. The farcical spectacle created by Billy’s inappropriate clothing accentuates the absurdity of such a scrawny, mild-mannered soldier. His azure toga, a leftover scrap of stage curtain, and his fur-lined overcoat, several sizes too small, throw his incongruity into relief. They underscore a central irony: such a creature could walk through war, oblivious yet unscathed, while so many others with more appropriate attire and provisions perish. It is in this shocked and physically exhausted state that Billy first comes “unstuck in time” and begins swinging to and fro through the events of his life, past and future.
Billy lives a life full of indignity and so, perhaps, has no great fear of death. He is oddly suited, therefore, to the Tralfamadorian philosophy of accepting death. This fact may point to an interpretation of the Tralfamadorians as a figment of Billy’s disturbed mind, an elaborate coping mechanism to explain the meaningless slaughter Billy has witnessed. By uttering “So it goes” after each death, the narrator, like Billy, does not diminish the gravity of death but rather lends an equalizing dignity to all death, no matter how random or ironic, how immediate or removed. Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident just as Billy is about to go off to war. So it goes. A former hobo dies in Billy’s railway car while declaring the conditions not bad at all. So it goes. One hundred thirty thousand innocent people die in Dresden. So it goes. Valencia Pilgrim accidentally kills herself with carbon monoxide after turning bright blue. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim is killed by an assassin’s bullet at exactly the time he has predicted, in the realization of a thirty-some-year-old death threat. So it goes. Billy awaits death calmly, without fear, knowing the exact hour at which it will come. In so doing, he gains a degree of control over his own dignity that he has lacked throughout most of his life.
The novel centers on Billy Pilgrim to a degree that excludes the development of the supporting characters, who exist in the text only as they relate to Billy’s experience of events.
Important Quotations Explained
1. It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”
Kurt Vonnegut, as the narrator, addresses his publisher Seymour (“Sam”) Lawrence directly in this passage from Chapter 1. He seems to apologize for delivering such a short, fragmented manuscript. The irony of this passage is that if there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, then writing a book about one, no matter how short, is a major accomplishment. Perhaps like birdsong, the book merely serves as a simple communication demonstrating that life still exists in a devastated world. The bird’s inquisitive refrain returns in the very last line of the novel, leaving us with the unanswered question of what life is like in the aftermath of war—life’s most devastating enemy.
2. Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
This passage occurs in Chapter 3, after Billy has been kidnapped and taken to Tralfamadore in 1968. There he sees the same inscription on a locket around the neck of Montana Wildhack, the actress brought to mate with Billy in the Tralfamadorian zoo. The saying brings to light the central conflict of Billy’s attempt to live a Tralfamadorian life in a human world: he subscribes to the Tralfamadorian belief that there is a fourth dimension of time and that time is cyclical, but he lives in a world in which everyone believes that time moves in a single, linear progression. Tralfamadorians would argue that humans never know the difference between the things they cannot change because there is no difference; nothing is negotiable in a universe of predefined, structured moments.
3. Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath—mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy hung up.
In Chapter 4, the night after his daughter’s wedding in 1967, Billy gets up out of bed, unable to sleep. He knows that the flying saucer will come for him soon. He wanders into his daughter’s empty bedroom, the phone rings, and on the other end is a drunk. It is unusual that Billy claims he can almost to smell the mustard gas and roses on his breath over the phone. This detail emerges through a kind of empathy that seems to connect otherwise unrelated moments in the omniscient narration. We, the readers, recognize this drunk from Chapter 1: he is the author, Kurt Vonnegut, who in his middle age has a tendency to make drunken phone calls late at night to old girlfriends, his breath stinking of mustard gas and roses. The odd combination of mustard gas, often used as a chemical weapon, and roses, a symbol of romance, highlights how deeply the war has affected Vonnegut’s life.
4. “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
This quotation comes at the end of Chapter 4, as Billy listens to his captors describe the true nature of time. These words reveal that not only do Tralfamadorians have a completely deterministic view of the universe in which every moment is structured beyond the control of its participants, but that they also lack an awareness of the possibility of free will. The alien who talks to Billy is an exception, having encountered the peculiarly human hang-up in his travels. But he maintains that humans, alone among all beings in the universe, believe in the illusion of free will. His emphasis on the idea of “studying” humans and inhabitants of other planets makes humans (and their conception of free will) and other non--Tralfamadorians seem like bizarre exceptions to the rule of nature. He thus performs a reversal of the human tendency to think of alien life as abnormal.
5. There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
In this passage at the beginning of Chapter 5, one of Billy’s captors explains the Tralfamadorian novel to him. It seems that Vonnegut has taken this template as a model for Slaughterhouse-Five, down to the rows of asterisks or dots separating short clumps of text. The irony of such a strategy is that Vonnegut, like Billy, lacks the Tralfamadorian ability to pick and choose his moments. Vonnegut thus considers his book a failure of sorts, because he has achieved the Tralfamadorian structure without its accompanying depth and beauty, and because he has come up with nothing more intelligent or deep to say about a massacre than “Poo-tee-weet.” Most readers would argue, however, that Vonnegut has actually succeeded in making a thing of great beauty out of a collection of tragic moments.
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON
Character List
Analysis of Major Characters
Charlie Gordon
Charlie is the narrator and the main character of the novel, and his miraculous transformation from mental disability to genius sets the stage for Keyes to address a number of broad themes and issues. Charlie’s lack of intelligence has made him a trusting and friendly man, as he assumes that the people in his life—most notably, his coworkers at Donner’s Bakery—are as well intentioned as he is. As his intelligence grows, however, Charlie gains perspective on his past and present. He realizes that people have often taken advantage of him and have been cruel to him for sport, knowing that he would not understand. Likewise, he realizes that when people have been kind to him, it usually has been out of condescension or out of an awareness that he is inferior. These realizations cause Charlie to grow suspicious of nearly everyone around him. Interestingly, the experimental operation elevates Charlie’s intelligence to such an extent that his new genius distances him from people as much as his disability does. Charlie eventually convinces himself that he has lost feeling even for Alice Kinnian, the one person whom he feels has never betrayed him and the only one for whom he has maintained a deep affection throughout his life.
Feeling isolated from humanity, Charlie pursues a course of self-education and struggles to untangle his emotional life. He comes to feel that his mind contains two people: the new, genius Charlie, who wants to reach emotional maturity, and the older, disabled Charlie, whose actions are largely informed by the fear and shame his mother, Rose, instilled in him. To reach his goal, the new Charlie must come to grips with the traumas the old Charlie experienced.
Although Charlie resents the mistreatment he endured while disabled, he harbors hostility toward his old self and, ironically, feels the same lack of respect for his intellectual inferiors that many others used to feel for him. It is only in the final weeks of Charlie’s heightened intelligence, before he reverts to his previous mental retardation, that he learns to forgive his family and give and receive love. Charlie’s brief moment of emotional grace comes in the form of the fulfilling but fleeting romantic affair he has with Alice. Finally, though Charlie lapses back to his original state at the end of the novel, a newfound sense of self-worth remains within him, despite the fact that he has lost his short-lived intelligence.
Alice Kinnian
Alice Kinnian is the one person with whom Charlie comes to experience a truly fulfilling personal relationship. It is fitting that throughout the novel Alice represents the human warmth and kindness that persist in the face of the intellectual and scientific focus of many of the other characters. Alice teaches literacy skills to mentally retarded adults because she cares about and enjoys working with her students; she does not believe that their disabilities make them lesser human beings. She takes genuine satisfaction in helping people and recommends Charlie for Nemur and Strauss’s experiment because she admires Charlie’s desire to learn. Charlie appreciates Alice’s concern for his well-being; she is a constant presence in his earliest progress reports, even though she is not a member of the scientific team that is examining him.
In Alice’s concern and affection lie the seeds of her eventual romantic love for Charlie. Though she is often deeply confused throughout their relationship, uncertain of what is and is not appropriate in their unique situation, Alice displays unwavering care for Charlie as his IQ boomerangs up and back down again. Her ability to accept Charlie as a person of any level of intelligence sets Alice apart from the other characters in the novel, who consistently judge Charlie only on his intellect. Though she is driven by emotion, Alice is not at all anti-intellectual; on the contrary, she is fascinated by academia and high culture. Though intellect and emotion seem to be opposed throughout the novel, Alice’s intellectual leanings demonstrate that one need not sacrifice his or her ability to love in order to enjoy a life of the mind.
Professor Nemur
If Alice represents the possibility of an emotionally healthy adulthood, Nemur represents the opposite. He is a man of great intellect but little ability to relate to others. Unlike his partner, Dr. Strauss, Nemur is never interested in Charlie’s human emotions; he cares only about Charlie’s quantifiable progress as an experimental subject. Professor Nemur thinks of Charlie just as he thinks of Algernon—as a laboratory animal. Pressured by a domineering wife, Nemur is desperate to advance his career and longs for his peers to regard him as brilliant. Nemur cannot stand to be shown up by anyone—not by Strauss, and certainly not by Charlie. He is deeply perturbed when Charlie surpasses him intellectually and takes command of the experiment. Though Charlie resents Nemur for most of the novel, we see after the operation that Charlie himself is potentially at risk of becoming cold and loveless like Nemur.
Rose Gordon
Obsessed by an imaginary ideal of normalcy, Rose initially responded to Charlie’s mental disability with denial. She insisted that her son was normal, and she developed a delusional theory that he was brilliant but was cursed by jealous neighborhood mothers. Her refusal to accept her son’s disability was demonstrated by her decision to name Charlie’s younger sister Norma because it sounds like “normal.” After Norma’s birth, Rose turned her full attention to Norma’s success and tried to ignore Charlie altogether. Signs of Charlie’s progression toward adulthood, especially his manifestations of sexuality, infuriated Rose. She demanded that Charlie be removed from her home. By denying his existence, she also denied what she perceived to be her failure as a mother.
When Charlie, now brilliant after his operation, visits an aged Rose near the end of the novel, her capacity for denial has grown into full-fledged dementia. She switches back and forth from recognizing Charlie to thinking he is a stranger, and back and forth from pride at his recent accomplishments to an irrational fear that he has come back to molest Norma. In her old age, Rose has been driven entirely mad by her overwhelming yet doomed desire to be what she perceives as normal.
Important Quotations Explained
1. And he said that meens Im doing something grate for sience and Ill be famus and my name will go down in the books. I dont care so much about beeing famus. I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.
Here, in his “progris riport 6th,” Charlie recounts a conversation he has with Nemur shortly before his operation. Nemur cannot guarantee that Charlie’s procedure will be successful, but he is trying to make Charlie feel good about his participation in the experiment nonetheless. Nemur’s attempts to impress Charlie with promises of fame and great contributions to science reveal his true motivations. It is Nemur who wants his name to “go down in the books,” not Charlie. On the contrary, Charlie’s reason for wanting to be intelligent is purely social: he wants people to like him. Charlie knows that his retardation has cut him off from most of society, but his powerlessness does not upset him. Charlie does not long to join society to increase his social standing; rather, he longs to join primarily because he is lonely. In Charlie’s mind, intelligence is the quality that will gain him entry into a world of friends. The resulting irony is that when Charlie does become incredibly intelligent, he finds himself even lonelier than before.
2. “And I hate school! I hate it! I’ll stop studying, and I’ll be a dummy like him. I’ll forget everything I learned and then I’ll be just like him.” She runs out of the room, shrieking: “It’s happening to me already. I’m forgetting everything . . . I’m forgetting . . . I don’t remember anything I learned any more!”
This passage, from Progress Report 12, is part of one of Charlie’s flashbacks to his childhood, in this case the incident when Norma demands her parents give her a dog because she has received an A on her history exam. After her father denies Norma the dog because she refuses to allow Charlie to help care for it, Norma angrily threatens her parents. She feels that Charlie is getting preferential treatment because he is retarded, and she suggests that perhaps she should become a “dummy” like him to receive the same treatment. Though Norma is clearly being absurd and sarcastic, for a moment it seems that she genuinely envies Charlie’s retardation—the only time in the novel when anyone perceives Charlie’s disability as an advantage. Listening to Norma rant, however, Charlie can hardly feel that he is in an enviable position. His disability, which he cannot help, makes his sister miserable.
Norma’s threat to lose her intelligence is meant to be just as ludicrous as the notion that Charlie could gain intelligence by his own will. Of course, many years later, Charlie does in fact gain intelligence. Norma’s remark—“I don’t remember anything I learned any more!”—is a cruel joke meant to upset her parents, but it also foreshadows exactly what happens to Charlie at the end of the novel.
3. We were the main attraction of the evening, and when we settled, the chairman began his introduction. I half expected to hear him boom out:Laideezzz and gentulmennnnnn. Step right this way and see the side show! An act never before seen in the scientific world! A mouse and a moron turned into geniuses before your very eyes!
This passage appears in Progress Report 13, when Charlie and Algernon accompany Nemur and Strauss to the scientific convention in Chicago where they are presenting their findings. The researchers treat Charlie and Algernon as exhibits, and Charlie grows increasingly upset that he is being treated as more of a laboratory animal than a human being. At the convention, Charlie’s feeling of victimization reaches a new level of intensity. He is surrounded by an entire auditorium of scientists who are curious to see him not as an individual but merely as the result of Nemur and Strauss’s experiment. Charlie feels as though there are hundreds of Nemurs all eyeing him clinically, and that he is there not so much to enlighten the scientists as to entertain them. He imagines the chairman of the conference as a carnival barker, touting Charlie and Algernon as a “side show,” the portion of the circus where so-called freaks are put on display. Charlie imagines the chairman callously referring to him as a “moron,” grotesquely proving that he is not the least bit concerned with Charlie’s feelings. This paranoid fantasy is the height of Charlie’s sense of being objectified; it leads him to assert his independence by running away from the conference with Algernon.
4. I wasn’t his son. That was another Charlie. Intelligence and knowledge had changed me, and he would resent me—as the others from the bakery resented me—because my growth diminished him. I didn’t want that.
This passage comes from Progress Report 14, when Charlie goes to visit his father, Matt, hoping to talk with him and learn more about his own childhood. However, Matt does not recognize Charlie, and Charlie cannot bring himself to tell Matt who he really is. This reluctance emphasizes the feeling of split identity Charlie experiences as he grows smarter. When Charlie notes his intelligence increasing, he starts to have a sense that the “other” Charlie—his former mentally disabled self—watches over him, remaining present in the back of his mind. In this quotation, Charlie realizes why he feels he cannot and should not reveal his identity to Matt: Charlie is no longer that “other” self that he imagines, and therefore is no longer the same Charlie who was Matt’s son.
Though Charlie longs to connect to and understand his past, he realizes that he has traveled too far to be able to present himself as the same person he used to be. He believes that rather than being happy for his son’s massive gains in intelligence, Matt would feel betrayed if he were to discover that the articulate and bright man before him is Charlie. Charlie thinks that Matt would feel “diminished” by Charlie’s intelligence, not just because Charlie is now far smarter than Matt is, but also because Matt invested so much energy into relating to his son as a mentally retarded boy. For years, Matt dealt with the difficulty of having a retarded son, and he also faced the greater difficulty of trying to persuade his irrational wife to accept Charlie’s disability. Charlie fears that if a new, brilliant Charlie were to come along all these years later, Matt would feel that he had wasted all of his emotional energy and might even feel cheated. Charlie is effectively two people now, but neither person can have a whole life or a whole history.
5. P.S. please tel prof Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.
These words constitute Charlie’s second-to-last postscript in his final progress report. Having decided to go live at the Warren State Home and cut himself off from all the people he has known, Charlie writes farewells to Alice and Dr. Strauss, but he saves a special word of advice for Nemur. Throughout the novel, Nemur is portrayed as a humorless and intensely career-focused man lacking in human compassion. For a time, at the height of his genius, Charlie’s own intellectual self-absorption threatens to turn him into a similarly cold individual. Upon discovering that his bakery coworkers used to tease him for sport when he was mentally retarded, Charlie becomes understandably angry and embittered, hating the idea that he was the subject of such mockery.
Unlike Charlie, Nemur has not been the target of cruel jokes, but he is nonetheless insecure and fears any challenge to his authority. Near the end of the novel, Charlie comes to learn that intellectual superiority is not the most important goal of a human life. He is able to steer himself away from becoming like Nemur, learning to love and forgive other people. Now, in this report, written after he has fully reverted to his original state, Charlie tries to pass on some of what he has learned to Nemur. Although Charlie is no longer capable of articulately expressing his emotional discoveries to Nemur, his words nonetheless ring with the truth of experience. Nemur would indeed have “more frends” if he were not so focused on maintaining a pointless sense of superiority. Charlie finds that, despite the vast intellectual gulf that separates him from Nemur, the lessons he has learned apply just as much to an esteemed scientific researcher as they do to a simpleminded man confined by mental disability.
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