[Read only the short story]
What a remarkable literary achievement; the story by itself is great and has a strong note of an ancient tragedy, but the way Keyes decided to tell it is trully extraordinary and I guess it settled a trope, since I've seen similar narrative ideas in later writers, such as Stephen King.
A young man of low IQ (68, whatever the notion of IQ really means) is subjected to a surgery that triples his IQ and we follow his story through his own progress reports, written at first with many spelling errors, poor vocabulary, short sentences etc., and becoming more and more sophisticated as his IQ is raising. We learn how all this effects his life, his relationships, both with other people and with a laboratory mouse that had been subjected to the same surgery a little earlier.
I'm sure many scholars and readers will have observe it already, but I can't help but stress how much this story resonates -in a peculiar way- Steinbeck's "Of Men and Mice". I wonder if people who read both the short story and the novel consider the novel better.
Merged review:
[Read only the short story]
What a remarkable literary achievement; the story by itself is great and has a strong note of an ancient tragedy, but the way Keyes decided to tell it is trully extraordinary and I guess it settled a trope, since I've seen similar narrative ideas in later writers, such as Stephen King.
A young man of low IQ (68, whatever the notion of IQ really means) is subjected to a surgery that triples his IQ and we follow his story through his own progress reports, written at first with many spelling errors, poor vocabulary, short sentences etc., and becoming more and more sophisticated as his IQ is raising. We learn how all this effects his life, his relationships, both with other people and with a laboratory mouse that had been subjected to the same surgery a little earlier.
I'm sure many scholars and readers will have observe it already, but I can't help but stress how much this story resonates -in a peculiar way- Steinbeck's "Of Men and Mice". I wonder if people who read both the short story and the novel consider the novel better.