Comparison Between Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon and...

Comparison Between Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon and Awakenings There were many similarities between the short story â€Å"Flowers for Algernon† and the movie Awakenings. â€Å"Flowers for Algernon†, by Daniel Keyes, is about a man named Charlie, who has a very low IQ. Charlie gets an operation to make him smarter. It is a story about what happens to him during that period of time. The movie, Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, is about how some people, including Leonard Lowe, the main character, developed a disease and are now catatonic. Dr. Malcolm Sayer finds a drug that seems like a miracle drug. The movie is about what happens during the time that the catatonic patients are on the drug.†¦show more content†¦Charlie had an operation to make him smarter and Leonard had special medicine to keep him out of his catatonic state. â€Å"Flowers for Algernon† and Awakenings both had something to do with medicine which at first seemed like a miracle. In the end it turned out to be not what they had hoped for. Another similarity I noticed between the movie and short story was the fact that Charlie and Leonard both had some sort of love interest that they couldn’t experience before they became part of the experiment. Charlie, after his intelligence increased, started to realize how beautiful, smart, and young Miss Kinnian is. Every time he sees her he realizes more and more that he is in love with her. In Awakenings, Leonard falls in love with Paula. He never experienced love before (except from his mother) because he was catatonic most of his life. When he lived a normal life, he was too young to have any real interest in falling in love. One advantage of them being part of the experiment was that they got to experience falling in love with someone, which is something they could not have experienced prior to the experiment. The last similarity I will talk about was the theme that things are not always as good as they may seem at first. In â€Å" Flowers for Algernon†, Charlie got an operation to make him smarter. It greatly increased his intelligence for a while, but then Charlie regressed back to his original low intelligence level. In Awakenings, when they use the drug L-Dopa, all the