Charlie's Flowers For Algernon

519 Words3 Pages
The novel Flowers for Algernon was composed of written progress reports. Charlie wrote these progress reports, they were poorly written. So many spelling and grammatical errors existed because the reports were supposed to be written by a retarded man. When Charlie had his surgery done, day by day his grammar and spelling was improving, so were the progress reports. The author composed the novel with these progress reports as an approach of Charlie telling his own story. The author grasped our attention with this literary approach, because we kept on reading, out of interest, to see if Charlie really becomes smart. Once these reports started to get better, we understood that Charlie was slowly becoming intelligent. I believe that having this particular novel be told in progress reports helped its readers capture Charlie’s mind and thoughts more clearly. Flowers for Algernon is told in the first person point of view. The main character Charlie, through his progress reports, narrates it. The entire novel is centered on Charlie’s thoughts. The novel is portrayed in the past tense. Everything Charlie writes in his reports are about what he did days ago. The progress reports make the novel a bit hard to read at first, because Charlie is retarded, so he doesnt understand what he is writing, not to even mention that his…show more content…
The setting of the story takes place in New York City during the mid- 1960s. The major conflict of the story is Charlie’s struggle with his inner self to reach some type of maturity and feel normal. As he becomes comfortable with being intelligent for once, it gradually declines back to his original retarded state. Charlie is the main character. However, he does introduce new characters as his progress reports and communications progress. Out of all these new characters, the most important ones to Charlie are his teacher, Alice Kinnian, and Algernon, the
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