Flowers for Algernon: Progress Report 9 Summary & Analysis

Charlie’s coworkers are obviously trying to get him to break the mixer. They treat him as a tool or toy, to be pushed and manipulated for their amusement. It’s telling that even though Charlie has been working at the bakery for years, the “joke” never seems to get old for his coworkers—they always like asserting their own superiority by proving they can trick Charlie.

This is one of the first scenes in which Charlie “shows up” his peers. After reading about Charlie being teased and bullied, it’s very satisfying to see Charlie get the last laugh. It’s especially funny that Charlie doesn’t quite realize what he’s doing—he’s still so innocent that he seems to take little pleasure in wiping the smile off of Joe’s face.

Charlie craves new information; as we’ll see, knowledge gives him “a hunger that can’t be satisfied.”

Charlie still thinks his coworkers are his friends, but he’s almost at the point where he’s going to learn the truth about them. It’s suggested that Miss Kinnian is moved to tears by the tragedy of Charlie’s situation with his coworkers.

Evidently Charlie is now having an easier time remembering his past, but the more he learns, the more devastating his memories become—intelligence is no guarantee of happiness.

Charlie treats knowledge as a toy to be played with. He’s genuinely excited by the information he’s learning.

As Charlie’s mental age increases, he begins to respect the rules. In essence, Charlie is going through the agony of learning how to write and spell in only a few days (instead of the usual number of years).

The “plateau” Kinnian refers to means that Charlie’s brain capacity is at a new maximum, and will (presumably) stop increasing so dramatically now. He still has a lot of information to learn, but he now has the ability to absorb it all.

It’s a mark of Charlie’s maturation that he’s looking back on his old work. Charlie no longer lives in a perpetual present: he can remember the past and look forward to the future.

Charlie still doesn’t understand that his coworkers are being mean to him—while he’s intelligent, he’s so inexperienced with cruelty and bullying that he doesn’t yet know how to recognize it.

Charlie’s wet dream (those wet, messy sheets) is another clear sign that he’s entering a state of adulthood. He’s learning lots of information, but—almost as importantly—he’s getting in touch with his own sexuality. In the past, Charlie didn’t have any sexual feelings for women whatsoever—now, he can’t stop thinking about them.

Charlie now recognizes that he has lost his “friends” by gaining greater knowledge of them, but he immediately decides that the tradeoff was worth it—it’s better to know the harsh truth than to live in a state of blissful ignorance.

The more Charlie remembers, the more sinister his past seems to become. In this memory, Charlie is helpless and at the mercy of others. Though he’s gained intelligence since then, not much has changed yet—he’s still Nemur’s guinea pig.

It’s helpful to think of this novel as a “coming of age” story, told over the course of a couple of months instead of several years. Charlie is thus entering the stage in his life where he starts to discover his sexuality and learn about different people’s careers.

Charlie throws himself into his reading lists. Like so many precocious teenagers, he learns about sexuality from books long before he has any actual sexual encounters of his own.

Charlie still clings to the (rather childish) belief that intelligence is going to make him happier and more popular. Little does he know the truth: intelligence can also alienate people from others.

So far, Keyes hasn’t really questioned his characters’ assumptions about intelligence, but now he suggests that intelligence can’t always be measured by tests or experiments (and IQ in particular has been shown in recent years to be very flawed). This will be an important theme in the second half of the novel, when it becomes clear that there’s more than one kind of intelligence—emotional, social, academic, etc. It’s also important to note that Charlie hasn’t heard of the Rorschach test, even though he took one at the start of the book.

Charlie sees his new intelligence as a precious possession, and he is now paranoid about losing it again. This dream also brings up his subconscious and sexuality again, and relates these things to Miss Kinnian.

This is one of the more heavily Freudian parts of the book. Keyes thesis here is that free association can tell us important information about the subconscious mind. Charlie thinks of Miss Kinnian as a very specific young girl—a conceit whose Freudian dimensions Keyes is about to unpack.

Charlie has been a victim of bullies for almost his entire life. It’s especially telling that Charlie subconsciously associates Harriet with Miss Kinnian, as his feelings for Miss Kinnian grow more obvious by the day.

As Charlie sees it, writing (and knowledge in general) is a source of power. He’s finally controlling his own words now, and thus his own destiny

This is one of the first cracks in Charlie’s confidence. Here he remembers his previous inkblot test and rashly concludes that Burt was teasing him. This is a clear mark of Charlie’s sense of insecurity: now that he realizes that he’s surrounded by bullies, he assumes that everyone is bullying him.

This is a key chapter in the novel because it shows Charlie developing a more complex “inner life”— getting in touch with his own consciousness, keeping secrets from other people and exploring the depths of his own memory. These are all critical parts of the process of coming of age.