Charlie

Character Analysis

Charlie's about to take us on a wild ride. It's a tough task to pin down which Charlie is speaking throughout the book: pre-surgery sweet and simple Charlie, or post-surgery super genius Charlie. Is it a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kinda thing, or is Charlie just a complicated guy? That's the question, Shmoopers, and it's not going to be an easy one to answer.

Before It All Goes Down

Sure Charlie gives it to us straight. He's thirty-two, he works in Mr. Donner's Bakery, and he's got a burning desire. "I want to be smart" (1), Charlie says, and it's easy to believe him at first. But it's not totally clear how much Charlie wants to be smart, or whether he's willing to sacrifice his entire life to get that elusive I.Q. bump.

Charlie may seem childlike, but he's also incredibly ambitious. Dr. Strauss is convinced that he's one in a million, a guy who's come up against some huge barriers to read and write as well as he does (5.10). And let's face it, Charlie might be even smarter than his doctor friends think: he might not win a spelling bee, but he's pretty good at figuring out other people's motivations. Sure he's got his blind spots, like thinking the jerks at the bakery are his buddies, but who hasn't had a nasty frenemy or two?

It's chilling to think that Charlie might be trading in his natural intelligence for a more artificial kind of smarts. If he's really making a deal with the devil, what the heck is he getting out of it?

Dream a Little Dream of… Who?

A whole other Charlie stays locked up in a dream world, making life all kinds of terrible for real-life Charlie. We're talking nightmares in which Charlie relives his childhood, complete with a screaming mom and an evil little sister who'd like to trade him in for the puppy in the window.

And this version of Charlie isn't about to shoot withering glares and quote Shakespeare, that's for sure. No siree, dream Charlie sits "waiting for the slap he knows will come when his mother returns" (12.119). Sure he's a pushover, but that's because he's a defenseless little kid who doesn't yet have powerful friends to beef up his brain.

Even though real-life Charlie puts on a tough act, you can see that little kid peeping through the cracks—sometimes, literally. That's right—Charlie's always looking over his shoulder to catch someone watching him. He's playing a messed-up game of hide-and-seek to get away from that sad and lonely kid in his dreams.

Charlie's In the Mood for Love

What's a guy got to do to make a love connection? If you're Charlie, you'd better get used to striking out. "I want you to be my valentime" (9.53) he writes in a note to his childhood crush Harriet before getting made fun of by the whole school. In his early years, having a valentime means for Charlie getting something everyone else already has. By the time he grows up, goes under the knife, and notices how cute Alice is, his need for love becomes something totally different. It's about being normal, fulfilling sexual desires, getting over his bad childhood, and being close to another human being, all wrapped into a package with a big red bow.

No wonder Alice gets a little gun-shy after getting a look under the hood. Charlie may want All the Things, but being with Fay helps him get the sex part out of the way. By the time Charlie meets back up with Alice, he's ready to tackle the love thing head-on with a healthier attitude.

Proud to be a Bookworm

Slow down there, tiger. After Charlie gets the surgery, he puts pedal to the metal and starts studying like crazy. And he gets what an education is all about. He tells us:

Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the thing you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be. (71)

For Charlie, getting smart isn't all about being a self-righteous smarty-pants jerk. He's totally fine with figuring out that he doesn't know bupkiss, after all.

But hey, what smart guy wouldn't take the chance to lord it over some pretentious creeps? "What about Rahajamati's work in that field?" Charlie asks Professor Nemur in front of a crowd of scientist peeps, pretty much discrediting all of Nemur's research (13.148). That sure doesn't sound like the same guy who wants to learn only for the sake of learning. Nope, Charlie figures out that being book-smart is a form of power he can use to deliver the ultimate comeuppance: the revenge of the nerds, so to speak.

You might say that Charlie hits the smart ceiling at the conference, where he finally gets out of Strauss and Nemur's evil clutches. We'd argue that Charlie starts to lose intelligence after this moment, when he finally learns to use his mind against the people who created him as a Frankengenius. Could Charlie's newfound confidence and his downfall be related? We'll leave it to smart Shmoopers to figure out.

Freefalling Charlie

You know that feeling you get right before a rollercoaster plunges down? That's a little what it's like for Charlie to go from the savviest guy around into complete oblivion. And since he's writing everything down in his journals, we get a front-seat view to the chaos. Charlie tells us straight-up that he's afraid of what's going to happen:

Not of life, or death, or nothingnesss, but of wasting it as if I had never been. (17.284)

Okay, so Charlie's scared of just being a blip on the radar instead of getting to greatness. Sure he's turned in a really cool report on what happened to his brain, but he doesn't feel like he's cashed in on the full human experience. And unlike most of us, Charlie has a super short time to (A) figure out what being human is all about, and (B) make it all happen. That sounds like a tall order for anyone, but especially for a guy with an expiration date.