Joe's comments:
The book that inspired the movie “Charly” is a truly heartbreaking piece of 20th century American literature. The book is basically a set of progress reports told by the main character, Charlie Gordon, as he sets out on a journey to live a second life. Charlie is a mentally retarded adult who works in a bakery. He suffices day-to-day but is offered a chance to essentially get a new brain by a group of scientists.
Charlie elects to go through with the surgery, which has first been performed on a lab mouse named Algernon. Both Charlie and Algernon both begin learning at a monumental rate to the point where people once shunned Charlie now fear his intelligence. The news is broken to Charlie that he might revert back to his former state, though, and his world begins to crumble.
Like “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” and other books of the time period, the story is a critique of mid-20th century medical science and the way the medical community (and society in general) treated the mentally impaired.
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