Progress Report 9

Summary

Charlie begins to work at the dough-mixer in the bakery after a baker quits. It begins as an April Fool’s Day joke as Charlie’s friends want to see him make a fool of himself but Charlie does it properly and even faster than the previous baker. Mr Donner offers him a promotion and a raise.

Charlie wonders why his friends are upset at him but is unable to figure out the reason. However, he does wonder if he is getting smarter.

Charlie’s innocent belief that all his friends are good people makes Miss Kinnian emotional. He remembers a crucial memory from his childhood of when his little sister Norma was born. He once picked her up to pacify her, which made his mother very angry. Charlie’s mother thought he would hurt the baby since he was dumb. But Charlie notes that he would never have hurt an infant.

Charlie begins to learn about punctuation and its importance in being an educated person. For the first time, he writes lucidly and without any spelling or punctuation errors. He reads his old progress reports and is able to observe a keen difference in his abilities now and in the past.

Charlie attends a party with his friends from the bakery but refrains from drinking alcohol. Charlie is forced by his friend Joe to dance with a girl named Ellen. He trips and falls several times because someone keeps putting a foot forward to make him fall. Charlie finds it funny initially but realizes that they are making fun of him. Ellen too takes advantage of his gullibility. He makes a comparison between his adult friends and his childhood friends and realizes that everyone was always playing tricks on him.

Charlie is deeply embarrassed and runs out of the party. He walks home and has a sexual dream about the girl he danced with. He realizes that the people he considered his friends, only had him around to make fun of him.

Charlie begins to imagine the stories he reads, in his mind. He also has a host of images from his past that come flashing into his mind. He is able to see his old self—an innocent but mentally retarded young man who is dealt with very cruelly by society.

Dr Strauss stresses that it is important for Charlie to keep writing his progress reports. He informs Charlie that his intellectual growth will soon surpass his emotional growth and he will find that with intellect, come problems that he will need to discuss with a psychiatrist.

Charlie is unable to make sense of this but remembers to keep a keen eye out on all his memories. Charlie shares his uncomfortable feelings about women with Dr Strauss who tells him that even though he is an adult, he is still a boy about women. Charlie vows to keep finding out more about himself.

Charlie has become a voracious reader and besides learning history, geography, and arithmetic, he is being encouraged by Miss Kinnian to learn foreign languages too.

Charlie has begun to feel anger at people making fun of him and recalls the times he was abused as a child, especially an incident when he tried to give a Valentine to a girl called Harriet.

Charlie goes to take the Rorschach test but gets angry and vents to Burt that he is tired of people laughing at him. He does not remember being this angry in his life. Professor Nemur and Burt realize that Charlie’s anger is a new level of intellect and that anger and suspicion are his natural first responses to the world around him. Charlie is amazed to see things in the inkblots but is still deeply suspicious of Burt. He is also uncomfortable that his progress reports are public and he does not want to write his most private thoughts into them, anymore.

Analysis

Charlie’s major achievement in this section starts with his success with the dough-mixer at the bakery. His increasing improvement is reflected in his report and writing.

Charlie’s repressed memory gradually surfaces and he realizes how he has been the subject of mockery by his friends for all this time. He finally knows what they mean by “pulling a Charlie Gordon,” which results in a complex emotion of embarrassment and earlier ignorance. Charlie’s feeling of shame is pointedly expressed when he blushes at the bar with the girl pressing up against him. Joe and Frank too are surprised to see Charlie reacting in this way as that’s the first time he has felt these kind of emotions. His wet dream about the girl highlights his adolescent level of sexual development and lack of information about sex. He tries to read more on sex to understand it better. In an effort to intellectualize sexuality, we see how the author treats the theme of intellect versus emotion, which is a dominant theme of the novel.

The incident related to Harriet reveals how Charlie’s feelings were innocent and gentle in his childhood. However, the cruelty of the other children led to his words being warped into something “dirty,” causing him to be beaten up. Since then, he has associated sexuality with embarrassment. His childhood memories further highlight how his mother’s denial of his intellectual disability and needless cruelty led to Charlie associating education with punishment. This is the source of Charlie’s inability to learn a new skill at the bakery. His father, a gentler man, tried to accept Charlie as he was but was overwhelmed with the dominant personality of his wife and hence could not prevent him from being beaten. All these memories add to the background of Charlie’s character and give a clear picture to the reader about how he came to be and his increasing awareness now of shame, humiliation, and often, anger.