Flowers for Algernon is about a developmentally disabled man named Charlie Gordon who undergoes a surgical procedure to increase his conventional intelligence. A mouse named Algernon has already undergone this procedure and has increased its intelligence. The internal conflict that results from the surgery, which makes Charlie into a conventionally "smart" person, is that he loses touch with his previous life and becomes more aware of his painful connections with other people.
For example, as Charlie gets conventionally smarter, he realizes that his co-workers at the factory he works at were mainly interested in making fun of him. In the letters that make up the novel, he writes, "I'm still a little angry that all the time people were laughing and making fun of me because I wasn't so smart." Eventually, he is fired from the factory because, as one of his former co-workers tells him, "It was evil when Eve listened to the snake and ate from the tree of knowledge." Charlie's co-workers feel left behind and offended when he becomes so much more intelligent. In addition, Charlie begins to develop a relationship with his teacher, Miss Kinnian, but when he becomes very advanced, he no longer has much in common with her.
Eventually, Charlie's intelligence declines, as the effects of the operation are not permanent, and Algernon, the mouse, dies. Charlie finds that he can't really connect with the people he was formerly friends with, including his co-workers at the factory and Miss Kinnian, and he decides to leave New York and go elsewhere to start a new life.
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