Flowers for Algernon
Told through the progress reports of Charlie Gordon, a 32-year-old man with an intellectual disability who undergoes experimental surgery to increase his intelligence, watches it peak above genius level, and then watches it decline again.
Summary
Charlie Gordon writes progress reports before and after an experimental brain surgery. In the early reports his spelling is phonetic, his sentences simple, his view of the world trusting and literal. After the surgery his intelligence accelerates past the researchers who operated on him, past the colleagues who used to patronize him, into a kind of superior isolation where he can see everyone's limits clearly and finds it intolerable.
The intelligence does not make him happy. It makes him contemptuous of the people who were kind to him when he was slower, and it strips away the psychological protections that let him function. He understands, at his peak, that the surgery was flawed. Algernon, the mouse who underwent the same procedure, is deteriorating, and his own intelligence will go the same way.
Keyes wrote it first as a short story in 1959, expanded it to novel length in 1966. The conceit is the whole structure. The reports decay in the reverse order they advanced, so the spelling and the syntax carry the regression before Charlie can name it. By the final reports Charlie is back near his starting point, but not entirely: he retains emotional memory of who he was and what he lost without being able to fully access why he feels that way.
The people who treated Charlie well when he was cognitively disabled treated him worst once he was more intelligent than they were. And he preferred the earlier version of himself, when he was happy in his ignorance.
Quotes
"I don't know what's worse: to not know what you are, or to know what you are not."