o pulls him away from Miss. Kinnian, his first love. Charlie’s intelligence also turns him on his “creators”, Dr. Strauss and professor Nemur. Charlie’s teacher from the Adult School, Miss. Kinnian, is a sincere woman who took interest in Charlie for his charm and kind heart. Dr. Strauss and professor Nemur are both psychologists trying to find a cure for mental retardation. They test their method on Charlie. They eventually end up struggling to remain superior to him.The conflict in Flowers for Algernon is a man vs. himself type. Charlie’s conflict is his intelligence. Whether it is when he is retarded or when he is a genius, his intelligence worked against him. Charlie solves his conflict by surrendering to it. But before he does he tries to do some good. He contributes to the experiment and that is when he finds out that he will eventually deteriorate. There was no way that he could stop it, so he gave in. Charlie was content with that, not happy that he had to go back to the way he was, but that he did things he never would have been able to do when he was retarded. The problem was solved in a believable way, and happened as if this story was a non-fiction novel. But ideally, Charlie should not have gone back to being retarded, and rather should have been able to reverse the process. He was a genius after all. Flowers for Algernon took place in the nineteen-fifties at and around the New York, New York area. The setting does not contribute much in this novel. Charlie’s experiments take place at Beekman University where Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss perform their experiments on Charlie and where Charlie performs his own experiments when he turn genius. Flowers for Algernon would not change much if it took place in a different setting. Except the technology involved might have been different.The theme of Flowers for Algernon is that humans do not understand that mentally handicap...
