Flowers for Algernon: Progress Report 12 Summary & Analysis

It’s true that Nemur is arrogant and condescending to Charlie, and treats Charlie like an object to be manipulated. And yet it’s also true that Charlie is becoming arrogant and condescending himself. Nemur’s “Frankenstein’s monster” has moved beyond his control—the student has become the master.

Charlie is heeding Alice’s advice, “taking it slow” while he tries to resolve his psychological issues.

Charlie seems to be nursing repressed feelings of guilt. While he loves his sister, Charlie recognizes that his own mental disability made life harder for her. This helps explain why Charlie wanted to become a genius in the first place: he may not have remembered this specific incident, but he was trained from childhood to feel guilty about his disability and to see it as something that hurt others.

Charlie experienced bullying and cruelty from all sides growing up, and was always made to feel “less then.”

This is an important reminder Charlie’s most basic characteristic is his drive; i.e., his desire for prestige. There are smarter people in Charlie’s class, but none who work as hard as he does.

Charlie is shocked to find that he can’t muster much sympathy for his old friends. This helps him realize that he’s become arrogant and self-absorbed, in a way that would have been astounding to him before his surgery. While it’s true that Charlie’s professors have been condescending to him, it’s also true that Charlie has become condescending to others. This is partly Keyes’s commentary on how humans naturally scorn those they deem “inferior” to themselves, but it’s also Charlie asserting his own independence and freedom—he wants to break free from the people controlling his life.

Here, we see another version of Charlie’s “unquenchable thirst.” Charlie doesn’t just want emotional contact—he wants to be in contact with people who challenge him intellectually. Finding that Alice doesn’t fit the bill, Charlie goes off to Chicago in the hopes that he’ll find an intellectual equal there.

The tables have turned: where before Alice was the intelligent one, supervising Charlie, Charlie has become the genius, looking down on Alice as if she were a mere child. The difference, of course, is that Alice never condescended to Charlie, while Charlie can’t help but treat Alice with disdain.

Charlie knows that he’s sexually inexperienced. He tries to “educate” himself in sexuality the only way he knows how—by “breezing through” the material. Thus, he tries to meet “experienced women.”

For a contemporary reader, it’s a little hard to understand this scene; it’s tough to distinguish between Keyes' own disdain for the pregnant woman (partly a product of the era) and Charlie’s. While the idea of a pregnant woman having sex with a stranger would have been disturbing to many of Keyes’ 60s readers, it’s also true that Charlie finds the woman especially disturbing because he regards himself as a child, still the slave of his own mother. In short, Charlie has been trying to escape his mother’s influence, and instead, he comes upon a sexualized mother figure.

Charlie finds that sexual education doesn’t work like scientific or literary education: he can’t treat women like objects.

Charlie’s feelings of guilt are so profound that he wants to be caught. Because of his mother’s treatment of him, he now associates desire with punishment.