Flowers for algernon, intelligence and its effects on personality

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1.Intelligence and it's affect on someone's personality. Does Charlie's personality change as his intelligence change? What is the novel's message about intelligence? Charlie becomes increasingly cold towards people around him. This change is driven by his heightened intelligence. The coldness manifests itself in two different ways. The most obvious is his unwillingness to trust the people around him. While being retarded he maintains a belief that the world is indeed inherently good. Whenever someone treats him cruelly he responds by assuming that their actions are caused by lack of knowledge or mistake. Charlie's increasing intellectual capacity forces him to adopt a far more cynical look on those around him. This cynical outlook not only drains his trust to a healthy level but turns into an almost paranoid condition. The more subtle change in which the coldness appears is that he becomes condemning of lesser intelligent people, dismissing professors as shams with very narrow fields of knowledge. This development in Charlie's personality is ironic since his ambition in the beginning of the story is to get enough mental prowess to be included in the same community that he distances himself from when he criticizes the average human as being limited and slow. Mr Keyes draws a unfortunate parallel between intelligence and arrogance turning Charlie into a elitist snob without much compassion for the people around him. His mental awakening is constantly portrayed as being at the expense of others. In my opinion this draws on the cliché of the book smart know-it-all. There is no attempt to try to explain why Charlie loses his good natured care for those around him other than that he can expose those who have been insincere to him. The story fails logically when Charlie's need to get intellectual stimuli hinders his involvement with Ms. Kinnian. If Charlie had no need

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