Comparison of Flowers and The Birthmark

I found a version of Flowers for Algernon online. It isn't the exact same version as we read in class but if you need a text to complete the home work this will be close enough. Just click the title. Below is a short article I found comparing the two stories. This will be helpful with what we have to do tomorrow.

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The two stories, Flowers For Algernon (FFA) & The Birthmark (BM), while separated by over 100 years are near copies of one another when looked at in regards to their theme. FFA is a story about a mentally impaired man who receives an experimental operation in a laboratory to triple his intelligence. While at first successful, he slowly regresses back to what he was and in a tragic climactic scene the reader realizes that this experiment will in fact kill him. In BM a beautiful woman possesses a strange birthmark on her face that her husband, a famous scientist, thinks mars her perfection. He convinces her to let him remove it, which he does. But again the reader comes to the climax with the patient dying from the experimental operation.

What clearly ties these two stories together is the theme. Humans are not meant to be perfect- and to try to overcome nature is dangerous. In FFA the main character Charlie, while impaired, is a happy man. “ I’m so excited I can barely write!” When he undergoes the operation he can see what he was, and in the end what he will become. Clearly he is no better off. In BM, Georgiana is kind, loving and beautiful. If Alymer had simply left her alone the two could have lived in wedded bliss for another 20 –30 years. “ He need not have flung away the happiness…” Even the titles of these two stories allude to their similar themes. A birthmark can be view as a symbol of our humanity- of our individuality. Similarly, the flowers Charlie puts on Algernon’s grave represent Charlie’s own mourning for himself.

In both short stories the conflict revolves around taking a human imperfection and medically altering it. Identically, in both stories the climax appears when each experimentee dies as a result of this vain drive for human perfection. Both Hawthorne and Keyes write fictional stories that detail the dangers that unchecked scientific progress can present to the world; and both stories will continue to be timely for many years to come as science continues to push the envelop towards human perfection.