The assumption is seen as though, "of course, if Charlie is a martyr, the question is what is he martyred by. The only answer is mental disability itself, now far removed from the earlier pity it produced on the reader, acting as a synonym for eradication..." (Cline 4). Charlie himself isn’t the “issue”, the unfortunate disability is. "Keyes may have wanted mental disability to evoke pity if not compassion in his readers, but he eventually converts it to the novel's primary villain by threatening the "highborn" with a "tragic fall" of cognitive regression..." (Cline 4). He wanted people to feel bad for Charlie and see that the issue wasn’t exactly the disability, rather it was the operation changing how God had made him. “Charlie's return …show more content…
Alice's credibility is even more compromised when she states, ‘People have not been bad to you.’ As earlier established, his mistreatment by friends and family characterized Charlie before his operation..." (3). This is an example of Charlie lashing out because he finally sees the way people have been treating and making fun of him. Once given the knowledge operation, Charlie was upset by the treatment he was receiving and hated …show more content…
Aware how doctors took advantage of him while disabled, and how family and friends abandoned him, Charlie rebels against the idea that he is somehow a product of others' medical creation. His only companion through this isolation is Algernon, the mouse who preceded him in the breakthrough operation. Algernon, however, loses his gained intelligence and dies, and Charlie's operation proves just as temporary; despite his best attempts to remain an intelligent man, Charlie eventually returns to his previous disabled state…” (4). Charlie deteriorates just like Algernon, so the operation proves to be non-receptive for both. Either way, with or without the operation, Charlie starts and ends the book with the same IQ. “The final "progress report" Charlie writes is from the same intellectual level as those he writes at the beginning of the novel..." (Cline 4). The reminder needs to be present that, “grown-up knowledge brings misery—if by misery, you mean awareness of misery. Whatever idealizations we had about the world are sullied by the facts of life. This is a necessary part of growing up but does not necessarily lead to misery. As the veil of idealization falls away and the realities of life are more evident, we see miseries we never saw before but we also see many joys... " (Kunst 1). There are things people like Charlie just aren’t meant to experience