Progress Report 10

Summary

Charlie finds a more cost and labor-effective way to speed up production at the bakery. He is given a bonus and a raise. Everyone seems afraid of Charlie now; he remembers when his colleagues bickered over him—some protective and some causing him physical harm in the name of harmless fun. He remembers the empathy of a few bakers at his workplace and wonders how their attitude toward him will now change.

People at the bakery are becoming hostile toward Charlie as he progresses in his job and is praised by his boss. He realizes that the reaction of his friends is the opposite of what he had anticipated. He however hopes to be able to ask Miss Kinnian out on a date to the movies, if he can get the courage to do so. But he wants to check with his doctors whether it is appropriate. When he reaches the lab, he eavesdrops on an argument between Dr Strauss and Professor Nemur about the pros and cons of presenting a case report on Charlie’s surgery. The doctors are ambitious and competitive with each other and their argument frightens him. Charlie walks away before he can be discovered and realizes that the two men are just regular men, and not heroes as he had imagined them to be.

Charlie knows it is wrong to hang around outside his college, after lessons, but he is keen to socialize with the other students and hear them talk about Plato, Milton, Einstein, and Shakespeare. Charlie now carries books around, like the other students, and smokes a pipe. He hates going home to his lonely room and starts making friends at college, listening to their conversations on literature, politics, and God. He begins to think, for the first time, about the meaning of God.

He also realizes that it is important to get an education and starts reading voraciously, even complex works of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Faulkner.

One day, Charlie has a dream about his parents. He remembers himself as a six-year-old boy who was frightened by his mother’s scolding and used to wet his pants. He remembers his parents arguing over him—his mother Rose arguing that Charlie can be normal and his father Matt asking his wife to accept that their son is not normal. He remembers their names and realizes that it is odd to forget one’s parents’ names.

Analysis

Charlie’s increasing intellect becomes a source of jealousy at his workplace. Rather than appreciation, his colleagues are now wary, something which he had not associated with increased intellect. The people who had been earlier kind to him are now no more protective of him. When he hears the conversation between the doctors, it dashes his assumptions about them, whom he had considered as God-like figures as they had been able to give him superior intellect. However, now equipped with his superior intellect, he understands that they are mere humans too with commonplace emotions. Further, he comes to realize that the doctors considered him as a lab specimen, and not a real person.

As more of Charlie’s memories of his parents surface, we see how his mother’s continuous denial and needless cruelty about her child further deteriorated his development. He remembers his parents’ names and is almost poignant in his description. These memories appear to him as flashbacks where he himself is watching the events. This highlights how over time while he has suffered the damage of his childhood, without time he has also distanced himself sufficiently when he can look at these traumatic events without re-experiencing his trauma. This further posits the idea of two Charlies in the novel now: the Charlie before surgery and the one after, who is now writing these increasingly structured and coherent progress reports.