Charlie Gordon
his story
Charlie Gordon and who he is
Charlie gordon is a 37 year old man who has some type of mental disease that makes his IQ low and ultimately less smart than the average person. He isn't the best speller and he doesn't have much of an imagination, but he takes adult night time classes for slow adults that is taught by a women named Miss. Kinnian. He has been selected by a couple of doctors who are going to preform an operation on him that is supposed to triple his IQ and make him smarter, but they don't know if it will be permanent.
Before he got smarter
Before the operation, Charlie was a determined and motivated person when it came to all of the tests and even the operation itself. For instance, the text says "I’m a slow reader too in Miss. Kinnian's class for slow adults, but i’m trying very hard.” (Keyes 34). It shows how he is determined because this tells us he is slower when reading, but he still tries really hard to become better at reading. He also tell us through this that he has enrolled in a class for slower adults, and he wouldn’t have joined if he didn’t want to get better. Another trait that charlie has is that he is motivated. The author shows this by stating “Dr. Strauss said that I had something that was very good. He said I had a good motivation. I never even knew I had that. I felt proud when he said that not everybody with an IQ of 68 had that thing." (Keyes). This shows that the doctor thinks he has a good motivation because Charlie wants to be smart so badly. Therefore, this means that Charlie is motivated because he wants the operation done on him so bad, as was shone by the author earlier in the text. Over all, Charlie was a determined and motivated person before the operation happened.
After he got smarter
Once the operation had been done, Charlie changed in a few ways and he became more aware of his surroundings. For example, the author says “I’d hidden the picture of the old Charlie Gordon from myself because now that I was intelligent it was something that had to be pushed out of my mind. But today in looking at that boy, for the first time I saw what I had been. I was just like him!” (Keyes 54). This means that as Charlie looks at this boy, he realizes what he was a few months ago. You can also see that he is looking back at what he was, and seeing what was happening and why the people were poking fun at him when he didn’t before. This is also shown here when the text states “I told myself Charlie if they make fun of you don’t get sore because you remember their not so smart as you once though they were.” (Keyes 61). This proves that even now that his intelligence is lowering, he still can tell if they are making fun of him or not. He also now knows that people may sometimes make fun of him because he is mentally impaired, and he doesn’t just think that they are his friends when they aren’t. This shows how Charlie changed after the operation in how he started to become more aware of what was going on around him.
Looking Back
Looking back as the story progressed Charlie became a more dynamic character meaning he changed over time or as the story plays out. The story shows how he changes in many ways including how Charlie gets more lonely, smarter, and even angrier in some ways as the story goes on. Charlie did change probably because of the operation that was supposed to raise his IQ, but it could also be because he wanted himself to get smarter so badly. I think the author may have created Charlie this way in order to tell us that one really good thing such as Charlie becoming more intelligent can lead to multiple somewhat bad things too. To conclude, Charlie changed as the story went on and became a dynamic character.