Perks Of Wallflower

Throughout the novel we see Charlies eyes opened to the world around him as he is exposed to murders and racism. Charlie the thirteen-year-old

This entire book highlights both the high and low points in Charlie’s life, and how he changed and has not changed all from his constant value of friendship to his many realizations, based on the one experimental surgery that gave him insight on what life would be like if he was “normal”.

To escape the daily struggles and to cope with how his life is going, Charlie begins smoking outside of his friend group. His sister catches him smoking and is amazed because of how innocent he seemed. This ignorance on her behalf just shows how much Charlie is changing for the worse. After numerous times of smoking, he starts going to parties and getting high. Most readers would expect him to react different to these situations but he welcomes them and makes small notes about other people at the parties. At one of his last parties, he’s on LSD and this just brought his whole emotional well-being to the ground. Even when he’s not under the influence of drugs, he’s still disconnected from what’s going on around him. By the end of the book, Charlie is stealing liquor from his parents and drinking it excessively to escape the realities of the

After falling out with his friends because of his mistake with Mary Elizabeth, Charlie became even more depressed than he was before Sam and Patrick. He turned to smoking as a way to grieve at the loss of his friends and the loss of his previous life. Charlie becomes ever out of it. When his sister needs him to drive her to the abortion clinic, he feels important and depended on and as he reported this was the first he felt needed. This repercussion with his sister helped him

Charlie Kelmeckis is described as a “wallflower.” He is socially awkward and likes to keep to himself. He also really enjoys reading and writing. Charlie cares deeply for others, but has a lot of guilt about past events. For example, Charlie believes that the death of his Aunt Helen is his fault, because she was killed in a car accident on an errand to get Charlie a birthday gift. Charlie has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Anxiety, and Depression. His mental instability was mostly caused by being sexually abused by his Aunt Helen before the age of seven. Charlie experiences flashbacks of his Aunt over the course of the movie, but all are portrayed in a positive light.

These points of interest propose that there is much more to Charlie than at first meets the eye. For example, he oftentimes specifies his uncommon want to "get shrewd," a detail that reemerges when Charlie hears the specialists say his inspiration as the reason he has been decided for the test. Charlie unmistakably represents his inspiration through his propensity for recording words he doesn't have the foggiest idea, for example, "Brain science LABORATORY" and "Topical APPERCEPTION TEST." Furthermore, Charlie's comments that his mom empowered his instruction as a kid yet would likewise hit him for lying start to allude to the perplexing idea of Charlie's association with Rose. This mother-child relationship gives a significant part of the shrouded inspiration for Charlie's activities, and the novel investigates it in incredible profundity later, as Charlie recuperates overlooked recollections of his

In the story, Charlie experiences being lonely in different aspects of his life. The first one that he feels this in is his family. His family consists of his parents, his brother and sister, and his aunt Helen. His parents, especially his dad, have never really been that involved or shown much interest in his life. This is shown when after he had been on LSD and was found in the snow, they never questioned if he was on drugs, they just contributed it to his prior problems of “seeing” things. His dad usually just ignored Charlie because he was different and quieter than the other kids. Charlie’s brother isn’t in the story much because he’s away at college playing football for Penn State. Charlie’s sister is in the story pretty often, but she doesn’t really talk to

The setting of the novel greatly breads Charlie’s life. In the suburbs, everyone knows each other better than in the city. Therefore, when one person is beaten by a mental illness, it affects everyone in some way. When someone has a mental illness people do not talk about it, it is pushed away and hidden. No one really tries to help, but once the problem goes to extremes and someone commits suicide, no one is not talking about it. So when Charlie’s best and only friend stops coming to school and they announce that he has passed away, everyone is whispering about it and trying to find what really happened. Charlie found someone who knows the truth and got the true but devastating news “Dave with the awkward glasses told us that Michael

He feels lonely, blames himself for his aunt’s death, abuses substances at parties, and has thoughts of suicide. Before he returns to the mental hospital, the camera shows him reaching for a knife. This moment suggests he would have committed suicide if his sister had not sent the police to his house. His depression could have been caused from his PTSD and feelings of loneliness. He was lonely on the first day of highschool because his best friend had also committed suicide the May before. He even describes to his new friends, “I didn’t think that anyone noticed me” (Perks of Being a Wallflower). He describes himself as “getting bad again” when his best friend dies, when he has not seen his friends for two weeks, and when his friend group leaves for college. These are all times when he may have been feeling lonely. He reveals his PTSD and depression through his relationships as well. Charlie is close to his family and reveals he has not spoken to anyone outside his family since the school year, but he meets seniors who help him find his way. He is loving, caring, and thankful for his friends and is sad when they leave, and he even stands up for them after they had asked Charlie to stay

Whitman had begun using the amphetamine Dexedrine to help him with his studies. Sometimes he went for days without sleep, studying and attending to various projects. Though friends and family generally agreed that Charlie was under strain and trying to do too much, no one noticed he was edging quietly toward violence. As time went on, Charlie became ever more consumed by his fantasies of

At seventeen he started smoking pot, but unlike most, he catalogued the strains of cannabis he tried, each time describing the feeling in scientific detail. Still through all the drinking and smoking he did well in school. People would ask Charlie what he wanted to be, he changed his mind a lot but eventually settled on pharmacist. Adderall was his drug of choice for some time in college, but eventually he started down a road of painkillers. Shortly after this, he dropped out of college, but with a fair number of contacts he found a job. The kind that carried a gun and didn’t pay income tax.

In the larger passages, Charlie exhibits some form of intense aggression, but all are excused under the motive of "self-defense." This is repeated, but not necessarily true. The legal definition of self-defense includes using "reasonable force to protect oneself or members of the family from bodily harm" (Self Defense Law and Legal Definition 1). In both major instances, Charlie is defending himself or Patrick (whom he considers family), but his force may not be considered "reasonable." He seems to go above and beyond when he attacks someone, unable to stop or think about what he is truly doing. Most people, when truly exemplifying self-defense, fight back on an even playing field so as not to get majorly injured. Charlie, on the other hand, immediately assumes the role of the aggressor and lashes out at his attacker (which, in the case of the LSD trip, is himself when he violently cuts his own hair). After he beats his target, he comes to realize the damage and begins to cry. This behavior is strange for anyone and is unique to Charlie and his

He said while the book is not completely written about his life, it certainly shows a parallel to events that he went through as an adolescent. Chbosky often seems to talk through Charlie, giving Perks a sense of relatability and truth. To me it seems like, Chbosky used The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a coping mechanism for what he went through as a teenager. According to Mental Health Weekly Digest, Teens are twice as likely to develop depression if they have been exposed to external factors such as violence and drug abuse. Within this group of teens many turn to coping mechanism. Teens in Charlie’s age group are more likely to only use one coping mechanism to help them, meaning that they are not as easily able to kick what is bothering them, and possible pick up other bad habits as well. Charlie turns to other things the take the pain away like smoking or doing drugs. “Essentially [LSD] is twelve hours of schizophrenia”(Chbosky 132). Who knows if Chbosky really did all the things that Charlie does in the novel, I do not know if this is his way of telling his story, or showing the reader what the effects of drugs are on an already very unstable mind are, but either way teens that use drugs as a coping mechanism are way less likely to get over what is bothering them. Chbosky openly admits that he had a very rough time in his highschool years according to

Charlie, Patrick, and Sam are at a homecoming football game watching Brad play. Charlie then stated “Sam told me during the game that they were going over to their friend’s house later for a party. Then, she asked me if I wanted to go, and I said yes because I had never been to a party before”, (29).This quote shows that Charlie has never ever been to a party. Here he can experience on for the first time with Patrick and Sam. At the party, Charlie does weed for the first time.

Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of being a Wallflower is an explicit coming of age novel that gives teenagers a sense of relation with the 16 year old protagonist, Charlie. This book was a bestseller in the year 1999. This book definitely has a more mature content and is very straight to the point, it includes drug usage from parties, sex, and violence. Although this book has explicit content, definitely do not let that distract you from the story.