Flowers For Algernon

“I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says mabye they can make me smart. I want to be smart.”

Charlie’s initial progress reports allude to his intellectual disability through grammar and style, including intentional misspellings (“progris riport,” “mabye”) as well as simple sentences. At the same time, they convey Charlie’s strong motivation to improve himself (“I want to be smart”). Initially, this motivation seems tied to a desire to please Alice, but as the novel develops, Charlie’s recollections will show that Rose’s mistreatment of Charlie as a child also led him to want to prove himself to her. 

“I tolld her how can you get that from cards that sombody spilld ink on and fotos of pepul you dont even no. She lookd angrey and took the picturs away. I dont care.”

During his initial encounters with the research lab team at Beekman, Charlie is baffled by the assortment of psychological tests. Charlie’s response to the Rorschach test, designed to test what “images” one sees in an array of random ink blots, shows his struggles to think in abstract terms. His reaction also shows that he tends to see things in overly literal terms. Charlie’s development over the novel emphasizes that complex functions, like imagination, abstract thinking, and an understanding of emotions, lag behind intellectual learning.

“And she said mabey they got no rite to make me smart because if god wantid me to be smart he would have made me born that way.” 

In the beginning of the novel, Charlie accepts without question that the experimental procedure is a good thing; the lab team and Alice generally say as much. Charlie initially does not have the knowledge that the team had.