64 pages • 2 hours read
Daniel KeyesFlowers For Algernon
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Algernon
Algernon is a mouse first experimented on and given intelligence. He gives Flowers for Algernon its title and is of central importance to the text, despite being of minor focus. Charlie and Algernon share something with each other that makes them unlike anyone else; they alone experience the procedure, its initial gains, and its ultimate failure. There is a bond between the two, and Algernon foreshadows Charlie’s fate.
Charlie draws connections between himself and Algernon. His initial relationship to the mouse is one of competition. Charlie struggles to complete mazes and puzzles while Algernon does so with ease. Later, after Charlie begins to develop intellectually, he identifies with the mouse. After his firing from the bakery, Charlie tells Alice: “I’m like an animal who’s been locked out of his nice, safe cage” (11). He begins to recognize that Algernon’s less-than-perfect post-procedure life symbolizes his own emotional and personal struggles that emerge in spite of his intellectual gains. United, the two develop an implicit friendship. Algernon’s connection to Charlie is unconditional, and Charlie responds in kind, as when he escapes from the conference in Chicago with Algernon and builds Algernon a maze in his apartment.
The bond between the two continues even as Charlie sees Algernon decline. Algernon’s increasingly erratic behavior and loss of intellectual function symbolize Charlie’s own impending losses. When Charlie insists on burying Algernon in his backyard instead of placing him in the lab’s incinerator, he is symbolically laying himself to rest. Charlie’s last lines in the novel implore, “[I]f you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard” (311). These words underscore the link between Algernon and Charlie; they end together.
The Knife
Throughout Flowers for Algernon, images of a knife emerge in connection to Charlie’s mother. The knife symbolizes the trauma of the relationship between Rose and Charlie, and how Charlie fears his mother. Charlie’s perception of the knife’s significance changes over the course of the novel, as his understanding of his mother and his own past deepen.
In Progress Report 11, around the time that Charlie’s memories of his childhood began to resurface, he has a nightmare. He envisions a woman and has sexual feelings for her that he does not understand. He also dreams, “when I look up I see a bloody knife in her hands” (83). In a way that Charlie does not yet realize, his trouble dealing with his romantic feelings for Alice stem from his mother’s shaming him as a youth for having sexual responses. He does perceive the knife in his dream as a symbol of fear. He sees himself “running down the hallway… somebody chasing me… not a person… just a big flashing kitchen knife… and I’m scared” (84). He associates the dream with the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice,” which includes lines about a farmer’s wife cutting off the tails of mice with a carving knife, a nod to the link between Charlie and Algernon.
In time, Charlie comes to realize that the danger symbolically represented by the knife has a literal origin. While visiting his father’s barbershop in hopes of reuniting with Matt, Charlie remembers the night his father took him, as a child, out of their home to live with Uncle Herman. He recalls how his parents argued, Rose holding a knife threateningly, Matt urging her to “[p]ut that knife down” (184). In the recollection, Charlie “sees on the kitchen table the long carving knife [Rose] cuts roasts with, and he senses vaguely that she wanted to hurt him” (185). When Charlie later visits his mother Rose and sister Norma, Rose again threatens him with a knife. The incident leads him to again recall the night he had been made to leave home and to reflect, “[s]he had a knife, and Alice had a knife, and my father had a knife, and Dr. Strauss had a knife…” before again recalling “Three Blind Mice” (275). These knives are referenced symbolically, representing the way that Charlie felt isolated and threatened by his family, the memories of his past, and the experimental procedure. In the end, however, Charlie overcomes the symbolic threat of the knife by accepting his mother and the reality of his own impending decline.
Mirrors
Mirrors are a motif for moments of self-reflection, particularly as Charlie attempts to come to terms with his identity in the later parts of the novel. During the conference in Chicago, Charlie finds Algernon in a bathroom, “perched on top of one of the washbasins, glaring at his reflection in the mirror” (164). Watching the mouse watch himself, Charlie is also symbolically looking at himself. At that moment, Charlie decides to escape with the Algernon. He grasps their plight to gain freedom and assert themselves as individuals.
After Charlie begins to realize the inevitability of his decline, mirrors take on greater significance. In the barbershop, with the intention of revealing his identity to his father, Charlie looks at himself in the mirror. He sees his father show “a frown of faint recognition,” almost recognizing him but ultimately failing to (182). Charlie continues to face his own reflection in the barbershop mirror, with “endless corridors of myself… looking at myself… looking at myself….” in an infinite regression (186). The implication is that Charlie’s identity seems impossibly unfathomable, that he cannot understand who he is. Indeed, he leaves the barbershop stunned, without revealing himself.
As he struggles with identity, Charlie again confronts himself in the mirror. During a therapy session with Strauss, he runs to the bathroom and notes: “That’s when I saw Charlie watching me from the mirror behind the washbasin. I don’t know how I knew it was Charlie and not me” (251). Charlie feels a rupture between his identity and the earlier, pre-procedure version of himself. Later, during another session with Strauss, Charlie half-jokingly recommends that Strauss hand a patient like him “a mirror so he can see what he looks like on the outside after you’ve shaved his ego” (279). The mention of shaving creates a connection between the therapy session and Charlie’s visit to his father’s barbershop. It suggests that he continues to struggle to come to terms with his identity. When Charlie mentions one’s ego being shaved, he is alluding to the erosion of his sense of self as he loses his intellectual capabilities and faces the reality of his impending end.
