Stephen Chbosky “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower” Essay, Research Paper

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER Stephen Chbosky

1. I really enjoyed reading the book. I liked the way it was written pretty much. Charlie’s letters are as intimate as a diary as he shares his day-to-day thoughts and feelings. You can somehow really get to know the narrator – Charlie – and you feel like he is writing all these letters to you. That is very interesting. Yet there are somewhat unrealistic tones, which I noticed some time after reading the book, because my first impression was how incredibly realistic it was. Charlie is only portrayed as the nice, innocent teenager. He does some things wrong, but in the end is near perfect. Even though he is screwed up, your compassion for Charlie is overwhelming, and you seem to forget that the book does not seem that real. Besides, in my opinion some of the letters are too “bookish”. However I still think the book is insightful, true and pretty sad.

2. The language was colloquial and very easy to understand.

3. There are lots of impressing parts, but the one I liked most is when Charlie is telling a poem at a Christmas party to all his friends. I loved the poem because it is that sad but, however, true, I think. It is about growing up and how things change when you are not anymore the lovely little child but have become a young adult. In my opinion it is written in a very sad, nevertheless nice way. Later on Charlie finds out the poem was written by a boy just before he killed himself. He feels really sad about this.

4. “The perks of being a wallflower” is the story of what it is like to grow up in high school. Charlie, a 15-year-old freshman, is writing letters who cover his first year in high school to an unknown person. Charlie encounters the same struggles that many kids have to face in high school – how to make friends, family tensions, a first relationship, experimenting with drugs – but he also has to deal with his best friend’s recent suicide. With the help of a teacher who recognises his intuition , and his two older friends, the seniors Patrick and Samantha, Charlie begins to be contented with his life. Yet not for a long time – depressed when all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about his Aunt Helen. Nevertheless, he makes it back in due time, ready to face his sophomore year and all it may bring.

5. In this book there is not really a climax because Charlie only tells about his life. Though there happen several important things that change his life a lot. One of them is when Charlie’s first relationship with Mary-Elizabeth, a good friend of Sam, ends miserably because Charlie remains compulsively honest about the fact that he truly loves Sam and not Mary-Elizabeth. That hurts Mary-Elizabeth very much, and somehow the whole group of his friends more or less does not want to see him for about one month. By the time Charlie realises how he did Mary-Elizabeth wrong and endangered the friendship of Sam and her. He starts to see how much his friends really mean to him and how much he needs them. Charlie remembers the beginning of the year, before he got to know Sam and Patrick, and how lonely he felt then – so lonely that he started writing letters to an unknown person. He finds out what friendship really means. That was very impressing and I really could empathise with Charlie.

6. The ending really took me by surprise. You could see from Charlie’s letters that he was emotionally unstable, yet I never thought he would have such a breakdown and have to go to hospital for two months.

7. I think Charlie was in some way like me.

I did not dislike anyone of the characters, they were all pretty sympathetic, I think.

Charlie: Charlie is the third child in a middle-class family. His older brother plays football at Penn State and his older sister worries a lot about boys. Charlie attends high school, he is a freshman and by no means popular. He is a shy boy, introverted and easily influenced. Patrick and Sam think he is a wallflower. He is also very na?ve and honest, which makes him a lot of problems later on. Charlie is a thinker, but he thinks too much, which sometimes leads to confusion and anxiety. He feels guilty about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s family at the time of her terrible car accident.

Charlie begins the year at high school as a friendless observer, but soon is friends with Sam and Patrick. He proves a loyal friend to his gay friend Patrick, and a helping brother when his sister needs an abortion.

Sam and Patrick: Sam and Patrick are step-siblings who include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, tries acid and falls madly in love with Sam. Sam is an 18-year-old girl who had to face a lot of problems the last years in college. As Charlie’s sister tells him, she is not very self-confident and had several bad relationships in the past. She really likes Charlie a lot, but when he tells her at the beginning of their friendship that he loves her, she just wants to be friends. In the end she somehow falls in love with him, too, but then it is too late, as she is leaving for college. Patrick, also a senior and Charlie’s best friend, is gay and has a relationship with Brad, a pretty popular footballer. As nobody is allowed to know Brad is gay, he has to face lots of problems according to this relationship