Cruelty and Bullying Theme Analysis

Flowers for Algernon studies the relationship between intelligent and unintelligent people, or more generally, between the powerful and the weak. Because Charlie Gordon travels between these two worlds—moving from mental disability to brilliance, and then back to mental disability again—he comes to see the ways in which people mock and bully their intellectual inferiors, partly out of cruelty, and partly out of insecurity.

People of average intelligence bully the mentally disabled, Keyes suggests, because they want to remind themselves of their place in the “pecking order.” At the bakery where Charlie works, Charlie’s coworkers subject him to a series of cruel pranks and jokes that reinforce Charlie’s stupidity, clumsiness, and gullibility. It’s significant that Charlie’s coworkers never, ever get tired of playing pranks on him (you’d think that after more than a decade, the joke would have gotten old). By teasing Charlie for his stupidity, Charlie’s coworkers are effectively congratulating themselves for being smarter than Charlie—none of them are particularly intelligent, but at least they’re not at the bottom of the barrel. This becomes clearer after Charlie becomes a genius. His former coworkers admit that they’re ignoring him because they don’t want a reminder of their own mental inferiority: they don’t want to be around someone who makes them feel stupid.

Much the same is true of Charlie’s mentors, Professor Nemur and Doctor Strauss. Indeed, as Keyes portrays it, the entire academic community suffers from the same inferiority complex as Charlie’s coworkers. When Nemur shows footage of Charlie before his operation, Nemur’s colleagues laugh at Charlie’s clumsiness. Then, when they meet Charlie as a genius, they shun him, one by one, because he’s smarter than they are. Even Charlie himself starts to look down on his intellectual inferiors once he becomes intelligent—first his coworkers, and then his teacher and lover, Alice Kinnian. Disturbingly, Keyes suggests that human beings have a tendency to bully people who are weaker than they are, and fear those who are stronger.

Thankfully, Keyes doesn’t end his novel on such a pessimistic note. Even if humans have a natural tendency to be cruel to their inferiors, it’s possible to replace this tendency with kindness and understanding. When Charlie returns to his job at the bakery, mentally disabled once again, his coworkers prove that they’re less sadistic than they initially seemed. Not only do they accept Charlie once again, but they also refrain from teasing him anymore. It’s possible to read Keyes’s novel as a moral fable about the dangers of bullying. There’s simply no sense in being cruel to those below us in the pecking order, because nobody’s place in the pecking order is completely secure.