by Daniel Keyes
1966
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Charly Gordon was 32 years old and working at a bakery.
He had intelligence as like 5 years old, called "mental retardation" generally. He lost in the maze race with a rat named Algernon, which had an operation for getting more intelligence. He desired to be wiser than Algernon, and decided to have the operation same as Algernon. The operation seemed successfully done, because he got intelligence more day by day. He took IQ 185 at last. He could read 20 languages and understood economics, biological, physics and so on. After the operation, it took only 3 months for him to get more knowledge than any professors of any category. And he also understood the world around him. Before having the operation, he believed that all men were kind to him. But he understood most of them pretended to be kind. In fact, they laughed him and made use of his ignorance for their own interest. Is it really happy for him to get high intelligence? And he also found that he would not be able to have high intelligence forever. His intelligence would become lower day by day... When I read this novel, I thought that "The world is filled with ill will". When Charly was ignorant, he could not understand it. He was also innocent in those days. But he had to know it after getting high intelligence. Daniel Keyes wrote as follows in the preface for Japanese paperback; "Intelligence doesn't depend on the score of the test. Though a man has high intelligence, I will not evaluate him if he does not have the heart of consideration toward the others." I hope that I will be a man evaluated by Keyes forever. |
